Tokyo

A View of the City

Donald Richie
with photographs by Joel Sackett

r e ak t ion books
for Edward Seidensticker

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

11 Rathbone Place, London w1p 1de

First published 1999

Copyright © Reaktion Books 1999

Donald Richie is hereby identified as the author of

this work in accordance with section 77 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
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without the prior permission of the publishers.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

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isbn 1 86189 034 6

I have lived in Tokyo now for over 50 years, yet I have not come to
take it for granted as many people do the places they live in. One of
the reasons is that since I remain an alien – as do all foreigners who
live in Japan, even those who live here for half a century – I perforce
see myself as separate. Always the exception, I see everything as
exceptional.
Another reason is that I was born in a small town in rural Ohio,
and – despite having lived most of my life in Tokyo, among the
largest cities in the world – I have never gotten used to vast urban
spaces. Big cities remain something to marvel at, to worry about and
to admire – not to take for granted.
Yet another reason for a resident’s remaining so conscious of
Tokyo is the city itself. It is unlike any Western capital, is built
differently and is used differently. Even reconstructing it on paper,
which is what this book is meant to do, calls for special means of
presentation.
Certainly, to have offered a logical, straightforward, obvious
historical description of the place would have been to misrepresent
this illogical, subtle, brash, teeming and utterly human place. There-
fore, I decided to draw my picture of Tokyo in the shape of Tokyo
itself. Thus I start with the core. Edo Castle (now the Imperial Palace)
is the core in a double sense, both spatially and temporally. From this
beginning, we walk along the still-circular streets that surround this
core, writing of developments. As the circles become more irregular,
we stray to related topics, led (as is the city) by association, and by
the end of the book we are out in the suburbs.
This is perhaps not the ordinary way to construct a book, but
Tokyo is not an ordinary city, and through this construction I hope
to reflect the sudden turns, the instant felicities, the surprising in-
congruities of the place. And I can also, I hope, show something of
what being here is like.
Donald Richie
Tokyo, 1999
Tokyo: a view of the city

Many cities have individual styles. Venice, Bruges, Amsterdam,

Rome, Paris – each has a style that is particular to it. Other cities do
not. In Tokyo, one feels – as Henry James felt of London – that the
city has no single style, only innumerable attempts at style.
Some of the attempts are attractive (Grosvenor Square, the
Imperial Plaza), but there is no overriding conception. One of
Tokyo’s reasons for such a lack is that while some cities (New York,
Rome, Istanbul) are still knit together by remains of their pasts,
Tokyo has very few of these.
What with fires, earthquakes and massive aerial attacks, the city
has long been accustomed to being burnt down and built up, and
though the invariable traditional construction materials – wood,
roof tile – gave a certain sense of uniformity, Tokyo has few histori-
cal buildings and hence lacks a basis for anything so uniform as a
style.
Almost nothing of Edo – as the place was called until 1868 –
remains, except the bare grid of the original streets. The buildings
along these are all relatively recent and relatively Western in
pattern. As they progress towards the present, the city comes to
look new, raw, unfinished. The past style (what there was of it) is
no longer visible, and the present style is no style at all.
One might say, then, that Tokyo’s style is an absence of style –
that is, there seems to be no overriding authority (which is what
style is – a kind of government) – and that the resulting mayhem is
the style of Tokyo. One feels about it as Alexander Payne said he felt
about London in 1872: ‘Nothing is more striking . . . than the utter
confusion and want of plan to the place.’
It was sheer size that saved London and prompted Dr Johnson to
speak of its ‘wonderful immensity’ and for Henry James to echo
him a century later with the observation that ‘. . . the mere immen-
sity of the place is large part of its merit.’ It is this which saves Tokyo
as well.

11
 Within a 50-kilometre radius of the Imperial Palace live 27 million
people, some three million more than in all of California. Tokyo is
large and growing still. Yet not half of this population is native; they
have come from other sections of the country, and more come all the
time. They always have. Even back in Edo times there was a saying
that the city consisted of ‘drifters from every province’.
The place has also long been overcrowded. Space is costly
anywhere in Japan, but in the capital it is especially expensive.
No-one here can hope any longer to own their own home, and flats
are expensive and small. Paul Waley, writing of the ‘receptacle
nature’ of Tokyo, speaks of the ‘pencil buildings, eight-to-ten story,
wobbly, windy structures that afford room only for hole-in-the-wall
offices and apartments’. Shops, bars, restaurants are fitted into stray
corners of the city; places seating only six or eight are stacked one
on top of the other like serving plates. A stall in a capsule hotel just
fits the horizontal human body, and television is viewed between
the feet.
Tokyo is famously a city where rush-hour pushers are employed
to shove passengers into already packed trains, where losing a shoe
in the scramble is not uncommon, where a crowd of a million (one
place, one time – New Year’s at Meiji Shrine) is ordinary. It is also a
city where the sheer number of people to stare at can be exhila-
rating. As Constantin Guys (quoted by Baudelaire, as quoted by
Walter Benjamin) said: ‘Anyone who is capable of being bored in a
crowd is a blockhead.’
An enormous city, Tokyo writes all of its qualities huge. One
can see the same confusion and want of plan in a number of small
Japanese cities, but they have nothing of the expression they achieve
in Tokyo. Indeed, the enormous lack of standardized streets, of stereo-
typed structures, creates its own kind of effect. With its vast lack of
an apparent plan, its mammoth deficiency of any civic attention, the
place appears profuse, febrile, prodigal and extravagant – at least
compared to such planned places as Beijing and Washington, D.C.
It was like this early on. The amazed Dr Philipp Franz von
Seibold exclaimed in 1823: ‘I can compare the bustle of Edo to
nothing but that of London.’ And Tokyo still gives the impression of

12
burgeoning life absolutely everywhere – flourishing in channels it
is true, but burgeoning none the less.
This is a quality one associates more with Asian than with
Western cities, and indeed Tokyo is much like Calcutta with all the
amenities, or Singapore before the city planners wrecked it. Japan’s
capital retains the enormous size of its population. It is in this sense
an intensely human city.
One need not feel about it as Shelley felt of his capital: ‘Hell is a
city much like London . . .’ One may rather feel about Tokyo as
James felt about London – that it was ‘the particular spot in the
world which communicates the greatest sense of life’.

Though Japanese municipalities, particularly Tokyo, may appear to

be reassuringly, or distressingly, Western, even a short acquain-
tance with these modern-seeming cities indicates that they are not
Western nor, indeed, in any Western sense, modern.
The high-rise structures, the elevated highway networks, the
proliferating suburbs are sights familiar to the West, but the city
functions in an un-Western manner. Tokyo may look like Dallas-
Fort Worth, but it does not act like it.
Roland Barthes noted that reticulated cities (Los Angeles is his
example) produce an uneasiness because ‘. . . they offend our synes-
thetic sentiment of the city.’ This sentiment requires that any urban
space have a centre to go to and return from.
Tokyo may have a centre (the Imperial Palace and its grounds),
but that centre is empty. ‘The entire city,’ Barthes continues, ‘turns
around a site both forbidden and indifferent.’ It is indeed built
around a central emptiness that forces traffic to make a perpetual
detour.
Another indication of difference occurs when Western visitors
attempt to locate an address. Their assumptions are that a city is
planned, that there is a logic to be discerned in its structure. Empty-
cored Tokyo, however, initially exhibits nothing of the sort.
Many of the streets are not named, though most of the crossings
are. The plots along these streets are not numbered, though the
houses are. But even if the districts are numbered, the order is often

13
arbitrary (sometimes still based merely upon seniority of construc-
tion) and varies, ward by ward.
As Edward Seidensticker, the pre-eminent historian of Tokyo,
puts it, ‘. . . the consciousness of place continues to be by tract or
expanse and not by line.’ The actual finding of an address ‘is a
matter of navigating in more or less the right direction, and asking
aid and comfort upon approaching the bourne’. Thus, here as else-
where in Japan, the civic concern which Westerners are accustomed
to in their own cities, the assumption that a private address is a
public matter, seems to be missing.
There is indeed little civic convenience of the architectural sort
taken for granted in the West. Given the size of Tokyo, there are few
large central parks and no real congregation of cultural facilities.
In 1986, on his first helicopter ride over Tokyo, the poet Anthony
Thwaite noticed ‘for many miles on every side . . . a dense sprawl-
ing huddle of smaller buildings, so closely jammed together that it
is almost impossible to see the narrow streets that twist between
them’. Also, ‘. . . parks and open green spaces (so obvious as one
flies above, say, London or Paris) are few and far between.’
Not visible but equally important to Tokyo ‘style’ is the lack of
zoning – no slums and no ghettos, no good and bad sides of the
tracks, no strictly industrial areas, no rigorously residential dis-
tricts. The city, Seidensticker informs us, ‘. . . has always accommo-
dated side by side the extremely well placed and the extremely
poorly placed’. The bank and the pinball parlour, the beauty shop
and the flophouse are juxtaposed.
All of this is because an overall plan, a civic ordering of the city, is
missing. There is no imposed and consequently logical pattern.
Tokyo seems the least designed of capitals, not so much contrived
as naturally grown.
The West has only one city cultivated in this fashion, and that
is Los Angeles. As critic Hunter Drohojowska has written: ‘To
know Los Angeles you must know Tokyo as well. Tokyo and Los
Angeles are mirror cities, both wholly artificial, heavily reliant on
surface appearances and essentially comfortable with life not as it
was, but as it is.’

14
 The model for the more ordinary modern Western city might
have been something like a governmental report. The shape was
the intent, with orderly statements leading to understood assump-
tions. There is little ambiguity, not much is left to chance, and the
assertion is logical and conscious: a city has been built.
Such modern cities are, precisely, constructed. Paris under
Napoleon III was officially remade into something more orderly
than it had been. Before Baron Haussmann began his work in 1859,
there were only a few straight boulevards – St-Denis, St-Martin, the
rue de Rivoli. Napoleon’s government, fearing popular insurrec-
tion, had the city planner build new avenues too wide to be barri-
caded, thus breaking up the poorer Parisians into neighbourhoods
isolated from one another, thus constructing long avenues for the
rapid bringing in of troops who could then take advantage of
unbroken lines of fire. With Versailles as his model, Haussmann
turned a monumental palace into a monumental city – just what the
government wanted.
His real aim was the securing of the city against civil war. But his
expressed urbanistic ideal was one of views in perspective down
vistas. He, in a maneuvre described by Walter Benjamin, ‘ennobled
technical exigencies with artistic aims’.
Tokyo never took this step. One of the reasons might have been
that there was never a civil war to loosen the web of property rights
– something even the destruction of the Second World War failed to
do. Yet at the same time, and unlike the original Paris, it was from
the first a city of political intent. Indeed, it once actually had a plan,
and this indicated its civic intentions.

Just as the Arab city is designed as an oasis and the medieval

European city as a fortified market, there are cities created by fiat.
Tokyo – like Washington or Beijing – was a city born of a decree.
‘Here a city shall be built,’ it was proclaimed, and so it was.
The centre of the capital still proclaims its origins. There sits the
Imperial Palace, ubiquitous, directly in the centre, built on the site
of Edo Castle. This is what the visitor sees as old Japan; this is what

16
the resident must go around on the way home. It is the hub of the
city, its core.
From the air, the palace grounds look like the Acropolis, the
streets of Tokyo ebbing away from this centre as do the streets of
Athens. It is like looking into a volcano; it is like looking down at
the cross-section of an ancient tree-trunk.
There in Edo/Tokyo sits power, it would appear, surrounded by
its inner moats, its outer ones having long since been swallowed by
the city it sired. It is a real citadel, less imposing perhaps than that of
Cairo, but apparently just as indestructible.
Grey stone walls, which in Greece would be called cyclopean, a
few turrets, one of which is said to contain elements of the original
castle, groves of pine and a recent swan in the ancient moat – all of
this in the midst of grey Tokyo creates a metaphor.
Not at first, however. Edo Castle was not begun until 1603.
Before that, the site was a small rise near a fishing village on the
shores of a shallow bay. There, the waters lapping where the moat
now stands, a daimyo named Ota Dokan, a retainer of one of the
Ashikaga shoguns, built a modest residence. From its eminence, he
could look down at the mouth of the Sumida River and, in the other
direction, across the plains of Musashi.
Finished in 1458, this residence was apparently unpretentious
as daimyo residences went. When Ota went to Kyoto to visit the
Emperor in 1464, he wrote a poem that described the place:

This house of mine

Is in a grove of pine
Along a blue sea,
And from its simple eaves
One sees high Fuji.

He was himself apparently just as unpretentious. A modern statue

showing him life-size in a country-style sedge hat used to stand in
front of the City Hall when it was located more or less in front of the
Imperial Plaza. While the City Hall was being torn down a decade
ago, Ota was exiled behind the Central Post Office. Now that the

17
new City Hall stands in shining splendour in Shinjuku, he, still
unpretentious, stands in the shadow of one of its towers.
Something more or less like this happened to Ota in real life as
well. His castle was the strongest on the Kanto plain, and that plain
was the site of several of Japan’s richest provinces. But when the
warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi captured it, his palace was destroyed.
The land – as always in Japan – was deemed more attractive than
anything on it. His modest citadel became a prime building site.
Its fate was decided at Odawara, along the sea to the south,
where Hideyoshi and fellow warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu discussed it
in 1590. The former is supposed to have said that when the war was
all over, he would give the latter the eight provinces of Kanto.
Ieyasu, pleased, is said to have said: ‘Good, let us piss on it.’ This
they did, side by side, on the battlements of the fallen Odawara
Castle.
Thus was Edo born. Thus, too, the origin of a folk custom. Public
urination is still common, and until recently men thus engaged side
by side could be heard saying ‘We are the pissers of Kanto’ – a
legacy from an earlier time.
Hideyoshi’s motivation in offering such valuable land was that
he wanted a free hand in Kyoto and knew what a dangerous rival
Ieyasu might be. If Macbeth had been Japanese, he would not
have murdered Banquo, but would have given him a small provin-
cial castle far, far away. In the event, however, perhaps Macbeth’s
methods were better.
By 1600, Ieyasu had achieved military hegemony. By the follow-
ing year, he had been named shogun and his government (the
bakufu) had been established. He had already consoidated himself
in Edo and had begun building his castle. The landfills at Hibiya
Inlet were aleady completed and the moat well underway.
As shogun, Ieyasu could order all provincial daimyo to con-
tribute men and materials. Some of the cyclopean stones were so
enormous that a boat could only carry two and required 200 men
to move them. Lumber was levied and the great castle itself was
built: pure white stucco made from lime, grey clay tiles, with two
enormous golden dolphins at the summit.

18
 Such building required more and more space. The hills were
levelled, the bay was pushed back, land was filled in. The castle
grew and grew. It covered all of Ota’s original site, all of the village
of Edo, and kept on growing. Indeed, no matter how large it got –
and by 1605 it was enormous, the largest castle in the world – there
was never enough room.
There was the shogun and his entire cabinet; there were the
daimyo, the provincial lords, and their retinues. This included not
only their samurai but also all of their attendants. In addition, there
were the craftsmen and servants who attended them and all of the
merchants and peasants who provided for them. The castle was
thus the architectural personification of an ideal feudalism, and
Ieyasu himself was the apex of this pyramid of loyalties, a structure
that lasted through all fifteen generations of the Tokugawa dynasty.
But it did make something of a crowd.
By 1635, the shogunate had established the system of sankin kotai,
which meant that daimyo should return to their home provinces,
usually every other year. Ieyasu’s plan was, however, not to relieve
the crush in the castle, but to strengthen his centralized rule and
thus weaken the role of the provincial daimyo.
Like Louis XIV at Versailles, he balanced his power by ensuring
that those serving him spent all their money keeping two houses
and travelling back and forth between them with full retinues. He
even went one better than Louis. While making these long, expen-
sive trips mandatory, he also insisted that wives and children (and
an entire serving staff) be left behind in Edo as unacknowledged
hostages.
The castle was filled to bursting: dozens of daimyo, hundreds
of samurai, thousands of servants and other attendents, and no
place to live but – eventually – outside the walls. By this time, the
castle was no longer a fort. Ieyasu had conquered, had engineered
an era of peace, a pax Tokugawa. Another reason the castle was
no longer a fort was that it could never have withstood a seige. It
was almost completely dependent on the outside for water and
food.
Nonetheless, although the Tokugawa period is now viewed as

19
monolithic, with Edo controlling everything in a despotic manner,
this was not the case. As the novelist Shiba Ryotaru has written:

The notion that we Japanese all share the same values is a gross
oversimplification. Creative thinking and social activism are the
products of a society which honors pluralistic values . . . Each of
the almost three hundred feudal domains into which Japan was
divided boasted an individuality and diversity all its own.

This is not to say that there was no cultural uniformity; it existed

in things like manners, etiquette, dress, hairstyles. Samurai were
rather alike no matter where they were, but merchants and farmers
were not. In actuality, the Tokugawa family was simply the leading
power in an alliance of daimyo lords. Shiba has said that Saga (in
the middle of Japan) and Satsuma (in the south) were like ‘different
countries’.

Nonetheless, from 1603 to 1867, Edo, the crammed castle in the

centre, was the functioning capital. The first foreigners all assumed
that it was indeed the real one and that the shogun was the ruler.
Knowing nothing of Kyoto and the actual emperor there, Queen
Victoria sent Ieyasu messages addressing him as ‘His Imperial and
Royal Majesty’.
The city was indeed the home of power, a capital in all but name.
The new castle – the core of Edo – remains the core of Tokyo; the
Imperial Palace still sits in three square kilometres of forest in the
middle of the metropolis.
Early Edo looked very much like a citadel-city, a fort surrounded
by walls and moats – and early seventeenth-century architecture
was monumental, an expression of power. For this reason, the
castle could easily adapt itself to sacred purposes when the time
came for the investure of the Emperor in Edo/Tokyo in the mid-
nineteenth century.
Many earlier citadel-cities – Athens, Sparta, Rome – were built
around shrines. The god dwelt in the centre. In Tokyo, too, since the
Emperor was until recently a god, his dwelling is holy, a shrine –
and a powerful one.

20
 Only a few generations ago, Tokyo citizens stopped in their tracks
to bow in the direction of this imperial shrine, the palace. In spatial
terms, they are still bowing since this area has never been menaced
by developers even though it contains what would be the most
expensive property on earth. Nor will the resident ever be evicted.
Even now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the imperial house is
inviolate. It is under taboo, and discussion as to its utility is never
heard.
Such centrality is a baroque attribute, and one of the qualities of
the baroque in any culture is an architectural display of power.
Certainly, a garrison helped to build Tokyo just as a garrison helped
to build modern Paris. Shogun Ieyasu would have agreed with
Naples’s King Ferrante who in 1475 characterized narrow streets as
a danger to the State. Like Baron Haussmann, he wanted to make
the city safe for its government.
This meant controlling land. New lots were allocated in what is
now Nihombashi, and a straight road was extended from the Ote
Gate to what is now Otemachi. The moat was enlarged to include
Tamaike, then a fairly large pond, the place name of which remains.
The daimyo were encouraged to build their estates all around the
palace. What is now Marunouchi used to be called daimyo-cho
because of these blocks of grand residences. One of the most splen-
did was supported by pillars carved to imitate cherry blossoms in
full bloom, a carpentry feat much mentioned at the time.
By 1608, the palace had been extended all the way to Kudan,
where Yasukuni Shrine is now. When finally finished, the shogun’s
residence was sixteen kilometres in circumference, its walls were
pierced by sixty-six gates, and there were nineteen towers – part
of one of which is still standing. The roof of the residence was 60
metres from the ground, and the donjon-keep – destroyed in 1657
and never restored – was a marvel. Inside, everything was forti-
fied – gates, moats, bridges, walls, gardens, ponds, even a stage for
the Noh.
Everything inside was ceremonial as well. As at Versailles, ritual
ruled. Etiquette was of such acute importance that minor infrac-
tions were severely punished. The complicated plot machinery of

21
The Loyal Forty-Seven Ronin (a famous play still performed frequently
at the Kabuki) gets its impetus not from an attempted murder but
from a failure to observe proper etiquette.
There were reasons for such extraordinary ceremony. The
Tokugawa state was a military hegemony, the longest lived the
world has ever known. And like most hegemonies, this one found
that the best insurance was bureaucracy and the most effective
instrument was ritual.
Life in this hive became hugely complicated. In this world of
ritual and ceremony, of intrigue and counter-intrigue, the castle
could nearly be burnt down (as it was on several occasions) and yet
court life would continue unchanged. When the temperate (‘Regard
all extravagance as your enemy. . .’) Ieyasu died of stomach cancer
(caused, it is said, by an extreme frugality of diet), life went on just
as he had designed it.
The centre of the new capital remained the castle itself. The
general form of the surrounding city, observed an early visitor,
W. E. Griffes, in 1876, ‘is that of an egg with the point to the south,
butt to the north. The yoke of this egg is the castle . . .’ All roads led
to it, though not in the straightforword manner of Washington, D.C.
Rather, the roads surrounded the castle core, like the rings of a tree,
and one may even now read the history of the place by examining
these concentric circles.
Retainers moved down into these circular streets and were
joined (the rings spreading) by the servitors and tradesmen who
waited on them and on the castle. As the city grew so did the rings
round the core. These became less and less circular as convenience
stretched them to and fro, as they were crossed by more expedient
paths, shortcuts curtailing the curving avenues. Slowly, the purely
military pattern turned civilian and then into that tangled array
typical of the needs of free trade and capitalism. It was as though
L’Enfant’s Washington had, once past the White House, reverted to
the paths and lanes of rural Virginia.
The core and a few of the ring roads exist even now, but elsewhere
a different pattern of growth has prevailed. This pragmatic shape
means that little thought is given to overall form, to political logic or

22
to civic beautification. This is something that earlier travellers,
looking for some kind of visible civic intention, found wanting.
In 1886, John La Farge wrote of ‘this big dreary city of innumer-
able little houses’; six years earlier, Isabella Bird had written of
Tokyo that ‘. . . as a city it lacks concentration.’ It was, she found, ‘a
city of magnificent distances without magnificence’.
There were, and are, few vistas. The city simply pushed itself
west to the plains or east to reclaimed land in the bay. The need for
short-term advantage rather than long-range planning resulted in a
city haphazard and natural – if that means ‘allowed to grow as it
will undisciplined by a municipal plan’.
Today, few patterns of original Edo are visible. One – besides the
castle core and the ring-like roads – that still exists is the bifurcation
of the city, perhaps not part of the original intention but an aspect
that has done much to create the city’s character.
This bifurcation occurred as the shogun and his officials decided
to grant most of the more salubrious and hilly portions of the new
city to the military aristocracy and the newly filled-in delta flatlands
of the bay and river to the merchants and craftsmen who purveyed
and laboured. These latter lands became the Shitamachi. The name
means ‘towns below’ and refers to those areas beneath the castle
but still within the city limits. Edward Seidensticker has felicitously
translated the term as ‘Low City’ – the hills became the Yamanote,
the ‘High City’. He has also estimated that the Low City, which
gave Edo so much of its character, only occupied about one-fifth of
the city.
It now occupies even less, the High City has grown so much.
Yet the traditional Low City perseveres, even now remaining dif-
ferent in feeling from the Westernized Yamanote. Now comprised
(according to the Shitamachi Museum) of Kanda, Nihombashi,
Kyobashi, Shitaya (Ueno), Asakusa, Honjo and Fukagawa, it still
retains what little is left of the feel of old Edo – distinctly plebian,
also fun-loving, less inhibited than those remains of areas where the
military aristocracy, the shogunate, observed its rules of decorum.
Paul Waley has said that even in the Meiji period, long after
Westernization, people going to the Low City still spoke of ‘going to

23
Edo’. The area is, in this sense, something like a medina or a souk, a
place where it all began, a place of commerce, of mingling.
So, just when the medieval city was being destroyed in Europe
in favour of municipalities more visibly planned, Tokyo was
evolving into something we would call medieval. After the fall of
the Shogunate in 1867, growth was governed by necessity rather
than decree. Though the succeeding government representing the
Emperor Meiji looked to the West and attempted some modest city
planning, the only laws truly followed were those of pragmatic need.
Even now, as one leaves the castle one plunges into the warren.
There are, to be sure, some straight streets, square blocks, properly
named and numbered. These are the results of sporadic municipal
concern. The Ginza, the Marunouchi business district, the Seijo
and Denenchofu residental districts – these evidence a brief civic
ambition. Otherwise, little planning is visible.
Some modern cities elsewhere are segregated on the basis of
difference – ethnic, religious, social. But this kind of manufacturing
of neighbourhoods is also not seen frequently in Japanese cities.
Degrees of difference which are indicated geographically all have
to do with commodities. One still buys cloth at Suda-cho, one banks
at Otemachi, old books are found in Kanda, fish at the Tsukiji fish
market. All of this one sees elsewhere in the city as well, but it
is in these districts that the actual remains of the mercantile guilds
are still found.
For rational, planned, logical castle-town Edo to turn so quickly
into unplanned, illogical Tokyo indicates that modernization is in
large part a dismantling, a destruction rather than a construction.
The logical construction which Tokugawa Ieyasu envisioned for
his new capital was in this sense modernized into the random,
seemingly aimless, overcrowded mercantile metropolis that has
resulted in Tokyo.

Those who refer to the winding streets of . . . a town as mere

tracings of the cowpath do not realize that the cow’s habit of
following contours usually produces a more economical and
sensible layout . . . than any inflexible system of straight streets.

24
Lewis Mumford’s observation indicates the structure which Tokyo,
once away from the castle, was evolving, not only in what had
been swamp, the Low City, but in the High City as well. Edward
Seidensticker has remarked that a map of this area ‘puts one in
mind of a vast, ancient country village, with the streets following
animal tracks and the boundaries of fields . . .’
The contours (cow paths crossing) were largely mercantile, and
small nodes of commerce grew around the silk warehouses, the
vegetable market, the charcoal sellers’ district. These were like con-
nected villages, the web of the residential capital growing among
them. Comparable to the European medieval city, the sixteenth-
century Japanese capital was eventually a congeries of little towns,
each with some degree of self-sufficiency, each formed so naturally
from common needs that the whole was enriched.
The small communities of Edo, formed by mercantile interests,
evolved their own necessary parts: the town hall, the public bath,
the goods store, the market, the pleasure district. Though such
self-sufficient groupings have largely vanished in the centralized
Western city, they remain visible in the Japanese one. Tokyo is filled
with (or composed of) such small, self-contained communities.
Almost no foreign observer even now fails to discover in Tokyo a
city of villages. Henry D. Smith II has collected a number; Isabella
Bird called Tokyo an ‘aggregate of one hundred twenty-five villages’,
though how she discovered this precise number is not known;
in 1930, Peter Quennell found a ‘huge extension of a single neigh-
borhood’; in 1976, David Riesman discovered a ‘metropolis super-
imposed on a series of small villages’.
Indeed, foreigners became so knowledgeable that the novelist
Junichiro Tanizaki (quoted by Seidensticker) could complain that
‘. . . foreigners and Japanese alike denounced our capital city as
“not a city but a village, or a collection of villages.”’ One of the
reasons this kind of city structure is so often mentioned is that it
is so plainly evident.
Such an urban pattern was perhaps once worldwide, but it is
now no longer found in Western cities, where units are welded to-
gether to create residential areas, business areas and so on. In Japan,

25
only modernized in the last century, these units remain indepen-
dent; hence the feeling of proceeding through village after village,
each with its own main street: a bank, a supermarket, a flower shop,
a pinball parlour, all without street names or numbers because
villagers don’t need them.
Each complex is a small town, and their numbers make up this
enormous capital. Like cells in a body, each contains identical ele-
ments, and the resulting pattern is an organic one. No town planner
has yet altered this natural order.
It is possible to see in this something like a national character-
istic. One can find in the cell-like structure of Tokyo something of
the cell-like structure of the country and of the life of its inhabitants.
As Kurt Singer has said, let the Westerner sincerely try to live by
Japanese customs ‘and he will instantly feel what a cell endowed
with rudiments of human sensibility must be supposed to feel in a
well-coordinated body’.
Just as the Japanese themselves can – and perhaps should – be
seen as a tribe, or a collection of tribes, so their cities may be seen
as integrated ensembles of small communities. This is as true of such
small collections as Sapporo and Kagoshima as it is of that megapolis
which now extends from Tokyo-Yokohama to Osaka-Kyoto.
The dwellers themselves are of several minds about their cities.
Teshigahara Hiroshi has said that all Japanese cities ‘are in a true
state of disorder. There is not one in Japan which is constructed
on any regular plan. There is no aesthetic harmony, there are no
standards at all’. Abe Kobo wrote that Tokyo itself is ‘a limitless
number of villages. These villages and their people all appear iden-
tical. So no matter how far you walk you seem to remain where you
started, going nowhere at all. And wherever you are in Tokyo you
lose your way’. Tanizaki had the mad old man in one of his novels
refer to ‘that overturned rubbish heap of a Tokyo’. And that finest of
Tokyo chroniclers, Nagai Kafu, wrote that ‘. . . it would seem that
we Japanese are wholly lacking in the ability to build a city.’

Tokyo had many opportunities to build a city. Tanizaki was

pleased with the 1923 earthquake and thought it would afford

26
the opportunity to construct a metropolis he could admire. Nothing
of the sort occurred. When the city was destroyed again, this time
in the spring of 1945 by American B-29’s, another occasion occurred.
I remember well what Tokyo was like after its destruction in the
Second World War. Here are some pages from my journal:

February 28, 1947, Winter – cold, crisp, clear – and Fuji stands
sharp on the horizon, growing purple, then indigo in the fading
light. I stand at the main crossing on the Ginza, nothing between
me and the mountain. It is clear because there is no smoke, few
factories, no fumes because the few cars are charcoal-burning.
Fuji looks much as it must have for Hokusai and Hiroshige.
I stand and watch the mountain fade. From this crossing it
had not been seen since Edo times; but now all the buildings in
between are cinders. Between me and Fuji is a burned waste-
land, a vast and blackened plain where a city had once stood.
At this crossing there are only two large buildings standing.
The Ginza branch of the Mitsukoshi Department Store, gutted,
hit by a fire-bomb, even the window frames twisted by the heat.
Across the street is the other, the white stone Hattori Building
with its clock tower: much as it had been with its cornices and
pediments.
There is not much else left: the ruins of the burned-out
Kabuki-za, the round, red, drum-like Nichigeki, undamaged. At
Yurakucho, on the edge of the Ginza, are a few office buildings
and the Tokyo Takarazuka Theatre, now renamed the Ernie Pyle,
and the Hibiya and Yurakuza motion-picture theatres.
Otherwise block after block of rubble, stretching to the hori-
zon. Wooden buildings did not survive the fire storms of the
American bombers. Those that stood were made of stone or
brick. Yet, already, among these there is the yellow sheen of new
wood. People are returning to the city.
I see them shuffling along the pavements, all those now
returning. One somehow expects festivity – there were so many
people shambling along or lounging about. But there are no
laughter and little conversation. And it is dark, this Ginza which

27
had once been a fountain of light. Now it is lit only by the passing
headlights of Occupation jeeps and trucks, and the acetylene
torches in the night stalls.
Here everything is being sold – the products of a vanished
civilization. There were wartime medals and egret feather tiaras
and top hats and beaded handbags. There were bridles and
bits and damascene cufflinks. There were ancient brocades and
pieces of calligraphy, battered woodblock prints and old framed
photographs. Everything is for sale – or for barter.
Stopping, looking, handling, passing, were the people. Uni-
forms are still everywhere – black student uniforms, army
uniforms, young men wearing their forage caps, or their army
boots, or their winter-issue overcoats; others were in padded
kimono, draped with scarves; women still in kimono or those
mompe trousers used for farm work which in the cities had
served as wartime dress. And many wear face-masks because of
winter colds. Also, everyone was out of fashion: in peacetime
they are still dressed for war.
How quiet the crowd is. The only sounds are the scufflings
of boots, shoes, wooden sandals. These and the noises of the
merchandise being picked up, turned over, put down. The
merchants make no attempt to sell. They sit and look, smoking a
pinch of tobacco in long-stemmed brass pipes, staring at the
black throng passing in the darkness of an early evening.
I look at faces: an old woman illuminated by a passing truck,
the white profile of a young student in the acetylene glare, a
mother, the blank round faces of her two children. Well over a year
had passed since the unthinkable occurred and the unendurable
endured. I was regarding a populace still in shock. There was an
uncomprehending look in the eyes. It was a look one sometimes
still sees in the eyes of children or the very ill.
And in the eyes of convalescents as well. Shacks are being
built, any which way, new streets are formed, a hut here, a
shack there. Yet Tokyo is a city of the dead. So many were killed, so
many were burned or boiled in the fire-bomb raids. The survivors
remembered.

28
 But at the same time the dead are being forgotten, as they
must be if we are to go on living. Everyday, the crowd is larger,
the eyes get brighter, Tokyo grows.

I sometimes pause on that corner now, look at all the tall buildings,
all that glass and marble and steel, and remember what it was like
before – the soft shuffle of the crowd, the smell of charcoal burning.
Then the sky would darken and the stars appear – bright, near. The
horizon stayed white in the winter light after the sun had vanished
and Fuji turned a solid black.

Affluent Tokyo – and it remains a rich city despite its various reces-
sions and its homeless – is an example of a modern industrial capital.
It exemplifies Aristotle’s remark, in The Politics, that ‘. . . a city is
composed of different kinds of men; similar people cannot bring a
city into existence.’
Indeed, one can learn much about the people of Tokyo by looking
at their city. They are industrious, wasteful, impatient, gregarious,
lavish, enthusiastic, given to following the latest fads and always
lamenting the past. Their common contradictions, their heights
of aspiration and their lows of comprehension prove Rousseau’s
dictum that ‘. . . houses make a town, but citizens make a city.’
The resulting vitality is such that if one loves Tokyo, one loves
it for its people. Indeed, one might say of the Japanese capital (as
Dr Johnson said of London): ‘When a man is tired of it, he is tired
of life.’
This vitality is largely economic. It is based, however, not so
much on wealth as on the growth of wealth. All the mechanics of
Japanese society are sustained in this way. The continual growth of
wealth is both the support and the means of this society. This in turn
is based upon raw materials that can be made into goods, or into
more wealth. Here, land is the main source of sustained and growing
wealth, but the amount of land is limited just as wealth is limited.
Indeed, everything is finite. Fujii Nobuo, the economist whom I
have been paraphrasing here, ends his argument by observing that
‘. . . this affluent society is built upon a flaw.’

29
 Although this is now becoming evident, Tokyo remains a
mercantile capital – one where the concentration of corporate head-
quarters in the centre of the city has so inflated land prices that the
residents have been squeezed out. The fact that people are still
pouring into Tokyo, anxious to live here, has been seen (again by
Fujii) not so much as the result of personal needs as the conse-
quence of the businessman’s will to locate offices in the central
wards of the city in proximity to the central government’s offices,
whose policies can have a definite effect on all businesses.
Waley has noted that since 1950, the population of the place has
doubled, as has what planners call the doughnut phenomenon: the
daytime population of the inner wards of the city (Chiyoda, Chuo,
Minato) is six times higher than the population at night.
Thus this overcrowded city with its substandard (‘rabbit-hutch’)
housing, its inconveniences, its lack of breathing spaces, its some-
times near-chaos, does say something about its inhabitants. Perhaps
it tells us that Tokyo has never been seen by those who live in it
as the monster that New York or London sometimes appears to
be – a place to be avoided, not to be inhabited, merely to be visited
for work.
Londoners actually want to live in the suburbs where they have
a bit of space, a spot of green. New Yorkers also have their reasons
for preferring Rye and Westhampton. Tokyoites, however, want
to live in Tokyo, always have, always will. For them the suburbs
(where the majority of the working force live) and the long com-
mute exist only because they cannot afford to live in crowded,
expensive Tokyo.
Not for them the apocalyptic view of the city, as Friedrich Engels
so expressively described it: ‘A town such as London, where a man
might wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of
the end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the
inference that there is open country within reach, is a strange thing.’
Not at all. The Japanese are the new nomads. Workers travel up
to two or three hours a day between sleeping place and working
place. This does not create the nomadic mentality, however, where
you stay until you use everything up and then move on. The Japanese

31
practise a kind of oscillation – one half fills up again while you are
occupying the other. This does entail a certain kind of rootlessness.
One does not become attached to the bedroom community merely
because one goes to bed in it. Besides, there are only suburbs out
there.
The closer to the middle of the city the better. Thus the prices
of property. Mark Girouard has observed that an aerial view of
Manhattan is ‘a three-dimensional diagram of property values
and rent levels’, expensive skyscrapers in the middle spreading
out to the cheaper reaches of the Bronx and Brooklyn. Tokyo is the
same, except that it all tends to be expensive near any node of
transportation, no matter how far out.

There is really nowhere to get a proper view of Tokyo. In Paris, one

climbs up to the Sacre-Coeur; there, seen from the top of Mont-
martre, is the whole city – visible, discrete, understandable. In Rome,
there are seven hills to choose among, each with a view of the
Eternal City. Similar city views abound in Budapest, San Francisco,
Edinburgh.
There is, to be sure, Tokyo Tower, and the tops of assorted
Shinjuku skyscrapers as well, but from these heights there is no
unified panorama. Nor could there be – not only is Tokyo too large
and sprawling, it is also too undifferentiated. One cannot look
down upon Tokyo as upon a living map as one can in Kobe and
Hakodate. Nor can one assume an order one cannot see, as in
Kyoto. It is difficult to comprehend cities you cannot see all of from
somewhere.
Nor is it easy to get proper views of any of Tokyo’s main sections.
The main streets are not about providing vistas. The grand sight
of an entire avenue – ‘one of the most glorious sights for state and
magnificence that any city can show a traveller’, as John Evelyn
discovered in 1644 when he saw Rome’s Via Pia – is not for the
Japanese.
It is not that magnificence is not for the Japanese, but that public
magnificence is not. The truly magnificent is, in Tokyo as in Edo,
always found in private. Historically, the reason for a lack of public

32
display was that it was not necessary to impress a populace already
impressed. Edo had no political reason for a vista.
In the same way, there was never any need to beautify Tokyo. In
the ordinary Western capital, there seems to be an agreed-upon
notion that beauty should at least be attempted, that being beauti-
ful is one of the aims of the architecture. In Tokyo, beauty was never
a public concern, not in the sense that it is in, say, Paris. Being
modern and being ostentatious were obviously architectural con-
cerns from the Meiji period on, but not being beautiful. In fact,
though Edo had a certain plain charm due to the coherence of
building materials, Tokyo is unusually ugly.
The modern city, from the Meiji period through the succeeding
Taisho and on to the earthquake of 1923, was ‘a sham hallway, a
grand façade with nothing behind it, a device for deceiving the
foolish’. There is no reason to regret its having been reduced to
ashes:

The Japanese people had already lost their dwelling; their national
treasure-house was by way of becoming nothing. Concerned
only about outward decorations, a country that has been unable
to make long-range plans should expect to meet such a fate . . .

– this being a summation by Nagai Kafu as quoted by Edward

Seidensticker in that finest of Tokyo books, Kafu the Scribbler.
When the country initially was opened to the West (to the extent
that it was) after the middle of the nineteenth century, a few Euro-
pean esplanades were attempted. The gingko-lined boulevard
leading into Meiji Park, that grand avenue leading to the Diet
Building – these are late promenades, but they are too short to be
really grand. And they continue to share something with the sham
hallway of which Kafu complained.
Edo too had few concourses affording splendid vistas. Not that
the city did not have its views. These were celebrated in poem and
picture: Mt Fuji seen from Nihon Bridge, the flowering cherries of
Ueno seen from the Kaneiji Kiyomizu-do. Such sights, however,
remained unconnected with vistas.
Nothing was made, for example, of the most promising material.

35
Aoyama-dori is a wide, straight avenue, stretching from Akasaka to
Shibuya. From a mid-point on a clear day, one may see Fuji framed
at the apex of the avenue, a splendid sight at the end of an impres-
sive vista. In any other city, much would be made of this. Not in
Tokyo, however. A vista is a municipal construction, and this is of
little interest to the people going about making their livings and
living their lives.
In any event, the streets are usually too narrow and too crooked
to make satisfactory vistas. The Ginza at its widest, for example, is
less than 30 metres, as compared with the Champs-Elysées, which
is 70. The Ginza sidewalks are just over six metres wide, vast for
Japan but narrow compared to those of the Parisian boulevard,
nearly twelve metres.
Otherwise, the streets of Tokyo are often too narrow to contain
proper sidewalks. The walker feels much as Walter Benjamin did in
Moscow when he noted that ‘. . . nowhere else except in Naples, do
you find sidewalks this narrow.’
As there is no vista, there is likewise no promenade. Just as there
is no public display of stately buildings, so there is no place set
aside for stately walking about. Nothing like Fifth Avenue once
was, nothing like the middle way of the Tuileries in nineteenth-
century Paris or the Boulevard St-Antoine in the eighteenth.
There is the Ginza, but this avenue was never intended as a civil
promenade; it was intended as a commercial promenade. In con-
temporary Tokyo, the only promenades are those more or less
constructed by the inhabitants: the Sunday-afternoon gatherings at
Yoyogi Park near Harajuku, the Friday-evening routs at Roppongi
crossing.
If Edo had no promenades, it was because one was meant to see
and be seen only in private – at the castle and at the better residences.
Walking about for the entire populace to gape at would have been
considered ill bred. The Emperor Meiji attempted to take strolls
outside his new Tokyo palace, but was soon stopped because such
exposure was unheard of. Anonymity in the street was the rule.
Women of means travelled by closed palanquin, and high-ranking
men went partially disguised if they were walking – particularly if

36
strolling around Edo’s single large promenade, the Yoshiwara
prostitutes’ quarter.
Tokyo streets do not speak in the measured accents of Europe’s
capitals and such European-inspired cities as Washington, D.C.
Bernard Rudofsky observed that a street is ‘no better than the
company of houses it keeps’, that ‘. . . skyscrapers and empty lots do
not a city make,’ and that ‘. . . a perfect street is harmonious space.’
True, but in Tokyo skyscrapers and empty lots do make a city, and
in place of harmonious space it is possible to have congenial variety
and vitality.

If the European street can be something like a stage, the Japanese

street is like a market. This is very Asian of it. Shops line the
street, open up, spill out. Clothes on racks and sides of beef alike
are shoved onto sidewalks. The fish shop’s scaly glitter is right
there, still gasping. Baby televisions, miniature computers piled
high blink eye to eye. Not here, not yet, the closed transactions of
the supermarket; instead, the raw profusion of consumption itself
exists right out on the street.
And even along the more sedate avenues, including the Ginza
itself where the goods are kept indoors, the promiscuous display
continues. Hoardings bellow, flags and banners yell, neon points and
kanji grabs. Signs are everywhere, all of them shouting – a semiotic
babble, signifiers galore. The foreign walker must feel much as
G. K. Chesterton said he felt upon first seeing Broadway: ‘What a
glorious garden of wonder this would be to anyone who was lucky
enough to be unable to read.’
This profusion, this advertisement, this babble is very Asian of
the Japanese street. And we would recognize it if the ‘units’ were
mangoes or rice cakes. But here they are calculators and microwave
ovens, instant cameras and word processors.
Yet it is still the street we read about in the novels of Saikaku and
see in the prints of Hokusai. In old Edo, the main street was called a
noren-gai. The better shops advertised themselves with their noren,
entry-curtains marked with the shop crest. The concept remains.
The noren may be façade-high neon, the metres-long laser

37
beam, but the gai is still marked as a place of display. From Ginza’s
shop-window showcases to the piles of silicon chips out on the
Akihabara (Electric City) sidewalk like exotic nuts, the display
continues.
The Japanese street, whatever it lacks in municipal presence,
remains an ideal to which all commercial venues must aspire. It is
the ultimate in unrestrained display. Other streets in other coun-
tries may strive for this riot, but they are handicapped by zoning
laws, by citizens’ associations and the like. Not so Tokyo, or not to
the same extent. The Japanese street is very public.
The reason is that the Japanese home is very private. In Edo, all
the better houses had fences, and in Tokyo many still do. Though
suburbia must content itself with token hedges and ornamental
walls, privacy is still respected. House and garden (if there is one)
are private property in the most closed and restricted sense. In
a city as crowded as Tokyo (or Edo), privacy is a luxury almost as
expensive as space. What is acquired at great cost is jealously
guarded.
This might be regarded as a national characteristic. Kurt Singer
found it so. Certainly, he wrote, ‘. . . no people could be less entitled
to complain of being misunderstood, unknown, or neglected than
the Japanese, whose first and last urge is to lead a life unseen by
others.’ Japanese writings, he observed, suggest rather than express;
traditional singing demands the repression of the voice; and ‘. . . in
every gesture of daily life, in the style of conversation, in the proper
form of giving a present, the rule, it seems, is how to wrap up
things, ideas, and feelings.’ Wherever the Japanese people go, ‘. . .
they make a network of walls and fences behind which to retire:
unwritten rules, ceremonies, and taboos.’
If what is thus enclosed is private, then what is not is public. So it
is in Western cities as well. The difference is one of degree. In Japan,
private space is seen as so sacrosanct that public space is regarded
as profane. Something which belongs to everyone belongs to no-one.
As a consequence, there are few effective zoning laws, small civic
endeavours, little city planning. While houses are subject to strict
scrutinity, the surrounding streets are not. These are thus allowed

38
an organic life of their own. They proliferate, and street life takes on
unrestricted, natural forms.

In this sense, much of Tokyo is a grand warren, a twisted tangle of

alleys and lanes. Though there are some grid-patterned sections
where civic endeavour has attempted to create order, this enor-
mous city is a comfortable rat’s nest. Streets have grown as old Edo
dictated and as convenience now directs. Opportunities to remake
the city have been resisted – not only after the various Edo disasters
but also after the 1923 earthquake and the 1945 fire-bombing.
One reason, of course, is that the warren is preferred. It was seen
(or felt) to be a proper human environment. The Japanese, like the
English, prefer the cozy, and consequently the streets of new Tokyo
are as crooked and twisting as those of old London. There is a corre-
sponding sense of group: our cozy warrens are just for us, not for
those of you outside.
In their interiors, many Japanese still insist upon a rigid dis-
tinction (almost English in its inflexibility) between public and
private. Take, for example, the fact that one is required almost
everywhere to leave one’s shoes at the door. Explanations abound.
It is more hygienic and we are a clean people; it shows respect and
we are a respectful people; such a place is, as it were, sacred and we
are a religious people. Another reason has been offered by Shuji
Takashina: ‘Rather than say that the Japanese use the floor for a bed
. . . it might be more accurate to say that they use [the] bed for a
home.’
Whatever the proffered reason, however (all of them are true),
one fact remains. Taking off your shoes indelibly marks the end of
the public and the beginning of the private. This is an important
distinction. George Bernard Shaw is remembered, in that he is re-
called at all in Japan, for the certainly apocryphal story that during a
trip here in the 1930s he refused to shed his footwear and strode in
brogues across the virgin mats.
Which concern is what one might expect from a people who
make so much of what is private (ours) and so little of what is public
(theirs). For such folk, the neighbourhood is of primary importance.

40
When a section is torn down (since the value of Tokyo land is some-
times higher than the native Tokyo feeling for the burrow is strong),
it is interesting that though the new big building may be four-
square and right-angled (since such buildings are now more cheaply
constructed), parts of the original warren are duplicated (dry cleaner,
beauty parlour, chemist) in the basement.
One of the results of public areas belonging to no-one is that they
belong to everyone and can be so used. This means that owners or
leasers of private land in public places may be as idiosyncratic as
they please. Those foreign visitors who have been told that there
is such a thing as monolithic Japan, that all the people there look,
act, feel and are alike, are always surprised by the extraordinary
variety of urban architecture. Given what they may have heard of
the Japanese character, they come expecting conformity and are
presented with the wildest diversity. A glass-and-concrete box (a
cosmetics outlet) is next to a traditional tile-roofed restaurant (sukiyaki
and shabu-shabu), which is next to a hi-tech open-girder construction
(a boutique), which is next to a pastel-plastered French provincial
farmhouse (designer clothes and a tea-room). This can seem threat-
ening, as in one of Borges’s labyrinths where the impression is

that of the interminable, that of the atrocious, that of the com-

pletely senseless . . . it abounded in dead-end corridors, high
unattainable windows, portentious doors which led to a cell or
pit, incredible inverted stairways whose steps and balustrades
hung downwards. Other stairways, clinging airily to the side of
a monumental wall, would die without leading anywhere . . .

Kafu noticed this at the beginning of the century, when he wrote

that ‘. . . there have been trains and streetcars and factories, but that
art of the people known as architecture has been quite destroyed.’
In its place was the modern building. Built to attract attention, it
had (and has) the same function as the signs and banners that
also sometimes decorate it. To stand out is to sell something more
effectively. As for conformity, well, there is plenty of that, but not in
anything so superficial as architecture.

43
 Actually, despite the architectural results, construction methods
remain conservative. The boldest flights are grounded in traditional
methods. The most traditional of these, one which stretches back
into history and which permeates almost all Japanese endeavour, is
that which we recognize as modular construction.

‘If the domestic house is the microcosm of the city, so the city is
the home writ large,’ said Donald Olsen, and in the deployment of
space and the construction of what is conceived as a whole, Japan is
no different from anywhere else. The Japanese house is much like
the Japanese city, also composed of modules.
In the traditional dwelling, the components are always of the
same nature, the same size, module-like. The tatami mats, the fusuma
doors, the shoji windows, the amado shutters are of invariable
proportion, built to fit every home. And this module-mindedness
continues even today when new apartments contain neither tatami
nor amado. The rooms are now built-up ferro-concrete or pre-cast
plastic lowered into place, each one identical – the carpenters now
tighten bolts rather than saw and fit, but the modular principle
remains the same.
The Japanese are, more than most, a module people. The language,
the thought itself tends to modular forms: the cliché is respected,
the ritual is observed; most of the arts – Japanese dance, the martial
arts – are taught in the form of modules called kata. One wonders
at the origin of this. Is it perhaps the pragmatic advantage of
form? Invariable observations oil the machinery of human relations;
modular construction lowers unit cost. What is now true of computer
parts was once true of tatami sizes and remains true of seasonal
compliments. And each unit is, within the confines of its genre,
complete.
Complete but impermanent. The visitor, attention turned from
spatial to temporal considerations, soon senses that, though now
such permanent materials as stone, steel and marble are used, the
city does not appear as though it has been built to last.
In the days of wood and roof tile, the nature of the materials
implied a certain morality. But now, though the materials have

44
changed, fallibility still seems to be assumed. The habits of the
old wood culture are maintained even though wood is now too
expensive to use.
Back when Edo was wooden, fires were common. Every decade
had its devastation, great swathes burned through the city. This
rarely resulted in fire-breaks (though that straight, wide avenue, the
Ginza, with its original fireproof brick buildings, resulted from the
1872 conflagration), but one consequence was to think of construc-
tion materials as expendable and to fold the idea of impermanence
into architecture. Even now that concrete is a common material, the
goal is not permanence.
The Federation of Housing Production Organizations conducted
a survey and found, in the words of a 1998 Japan Times report, that
‘. . . private houses in Japan stand an average of twenty-six years
before their owners knock them down and build anew.’ Many
owners ‘would prefer it if they could live in the same house for fifty
years’, it was reported. The fact that they do not indicates that per-
manence is not a goal; two-and-a-half decades are still enough.
A relevant factor is that the land itself, so expensive, must be, as
it were, renewed. Properties over a decade old rapidly lose their
value. It is for this reason that there is little serious investment in
better housing. Also, property taxes are low, and land used for
crops is barely taxed at all. Thus owners tend to sit on their land.
Somehow it has been decided that about one-eighth of enormous
Tokyo is still being ‘farmed’. This means that empty lots make
money, and the savings can be used to finally build on them.
In another sense, the feeling of transience in Tokyo has an
equally firm base. The city rests on more than nineteen different
active faults, any one of which could set off major earthquakes at
any time. The last major earthquake disaster in Tokyo occurred in
1923, when the city was partially destroyed and an estimated 142,000
inhabitants were killed. There are now over twelve million people
in daytime Tokyo, and fatalities could be correspondingly high.
Even without such graphic disasters, there are many reminders
that Tokyo is a fragile and transient metropolis. Heavy rains imme-
diately flood the streets; heavy snows always produce chaos. ‘1,664

45
trains suspended, 410,000 passengers inconvenienced . . . 38 people
require ambulence service, 1,200 households without power, more
that 310 flights cancelled’ – all of this because of a minor snow
flurry which deposited sixteen centimetres on the city. Invariably,
the headlines read ‘Snow Wreaks Havoc Across Tokyo Again.’ In
part, the havoc is due to an ordinary lack of human concern – traffic
jams, wearing high heels on the ice, etc. But in greater part, it is
because Tokyo has very little infrastructure equipped to cope with
the unexpected. Administrative offices work less well with each
other than they do in other major cities in the world; there is less
accountability in the Japanese system, and the buck, rather than
stopping, circulates endlessly. People in Tokyo exclaim: ‘If a snow-
storm can do all this, just think what an earthquake could do!’
More than most cities, Tokyo thus lives with an apprehension of
its own destruction. Perhaps some of the frenetic life of the city, the
feeling of dancing on the edge of a volcano, is a result of this knowl-
edge. Certainly, a part of the apathy, the lack of preparedness, is due
to a general awareness of inevitability.
This air of the transient, so noticeable in the Japanese city, is
enforced in that traditional Japanese architectural styles are rarely
seen. New buildings are constructed in fashions so flamboyantly
modern that one cannot but expect them to be superseded.
In new Tokyo, unlike old Edo, no unity of architectural style is
attempted or achieved. Just as some Japanese are meticulous about
family or office but neglect what we might call civic duties, buildings
are complete within themselves, and no attempt is made to harmo-
nize them with either their setting or those structures adjacent to
them.
Hence the random appearance of the modern Japanese city – just
one individual expression after another. The reason for the feeling
of unreality experienced by Westerners is that their assumptions
concerning urban grammar are not there to be read. After all, the
buildings do not ‘fit’ the streets – rectangular edifices located on
curved byways always result in singular effects.
On observing people on the street in Tokyo, a foreign fashion
designer, quoted by Peter Popham, said that ‘. . . the clothes are

47
beautiful, but the people are not really wearing them yet.’ There was
something, he added, not quite modern about that.
Tokyo architecture is like this. There is something not quite
modern about it. Also, not quite real. Consequently, Japanese cities
often feel like the back lots of movie studios. The various sets, all of
them quite large and seemingly permanent, are constructed, used
and left standing. There seems to be no reason for their arrange-
ment. They were built for reasons of economy and convenience,
and there is no unifying style because the uses of each were differ-
ent. Though they look sturdy, they were not made to last – and
indeed they will not.
The Western municipality which Tokyo most resembles is the
only ‘city’ the West erects in the knowledge that it will not last: the
international exposition, where massive buildings are thrown up,
avenues are constructed, and vast crowds are accommodated, but
only for a season. The assumption is that all of this will shortly be
pulled down. Building only for now, and only for show, architects
are encouraged to be extreme. Tokyo is like an international exposi-
tion which has remained standing.
It can be melancholy in the same fashion. As Nagai Kafu noted
(in Lane Dunlop’s translation) in his 1931 novel, During the Rains,
‘. . . when a city aped the West to the degree that Tokyo did, the spec-
tacle provoked in the observer is an astonishment, along with a
certain sense of pathos.’

In Tokyo, the buildings are mostly modern Western, but their urban
grid is not. The architectural style is visionary futuresque, but the
urban structure remains medieval. The civic organization is thus, in
Western terms, primitive. Extremely contemporary-looking struc-
tures are like nomads’ tents, with the difference that the Japanese
move not through space but through time.
It has been said that a great city is the best organ of memory that
humanity has yet devised. But if, as Emerson observed, a city ‘lives
by remembering’, then amnesiac Tokyo would be dead. A city can
live in many ways other than by remembering.
And as for being primitive, there is no doubt that Japanese cities

48
continue to exhibit a stage of urban development much earlier than
than of the contemporary West. But this primitivism is not to be
thought of in perjorative terms. It may be more simple, but it is also
more natural. Certainly, once comprehended, the Japanese city is
easier to read than the Western one. One can see the various village-
units that make up the town-units; one can understand how these
amalgamate into the city itself.
In the American city, unless one understands the complicated
social and economic forces involved, one cannot understand why
the main shopping districts should be moved from the centre to
the suburbs, why this ring city should have no central section,
why there is little public transportation to such distant areas. The
Western city is the more civilized in that it is the more highly
evolved, maybe more efficient but certainly more difficult to under-
stand and more uncomfortable to live in. Its assumptions are quite
different.
A Western surmise is that a city should be logically planned and
built to last. Each structure is presumed to be in its proper place and
constructed to endure. It is believed that what a person builds will
be enjoyed by his or her descendents. The urban complex may be
enhanced, individual buildings may be replaced, the structure
itself may be altered, but the assumption remains that, once built, it
will remain intrinsically as it was. This is accepted as literally true,
and the architect correspondingly builds for the future.
An Eastern assumption, seen especially in the cities of Japan and
particularly in its capital, is quite different. The city is not planned,
and its buildings are subject to almost routine renewal. Oppor-
tunities to redesign the city – earthquakes, fires, wartime bombings
– are ignored, and solid buildings younger than those who live in
them are pulled down to make way for new ones. The assumption
is that the city itself is transient, and the architect consequently
builds for the present.
The Western city assumes immortality. Buildings are made to
last. Behind this somewhat illogical notion – since human beings
and their works are nothing if not mortal – lies another concept.
This is that one somehow ought at least to appear immortal in

50
one’s edifices: anything which is made should be made for the ages.
This in turn implies some amount of striving. The architecture
reaches for something more than the human – think of the soaring
Gothic style. Dissatisfied with the common state of limited mortality,
the Westerner makes architectural attempts to deny it. (As indeed
do the more official cities of the East – Beijing is as solid as the
Pyramids, but in the Chinese countryside peasants continue to
build in mortal clay.) This denial is responsible for some architec-
tural wonders, but it is also responsible for decaying New York.
Asians, particularly the Japanese, have not (or have not until
recently) shared such assumptions. Rather, their assumptions have
been just the opposite. Impermanence is acknowledged as the
natural state and transience as a prime quality of life. There is
constant sameness within constant change, and it is this quality that
creates what small permanence the Japanese observe.
Take the great shrine at Ise, Shinto’s Vatican, located in a crypto-
meria forest near Matsuzaka. It is torn down once every twenty
years. The large wooden structure is demolished, and a replica –
identical in all respects – is constructed adjacent to it. Two decades
later, when the new building becomes old, it too is destroyed and a
structure precisely similiar is erected on the land the older building
formerly occupied. This has been going on for centuries and indicates
Japan’s accommodating answer to the demands of immortality.
The Japanese city follows the same pattern. For this reason,
Tokyo seems always to be under construction. Indeed, it will never
be finished. One thinks of Calvino’s city of Thekla, a place always
being constructed: ‘If you ask, “Why is Thekla’s construction taking
such a long time?” the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lower-
ing leaded strings . . . as they answer, “So that its destruction cannot
begin.”’
The logic of the Japanese city lies in just this temporal considera-
tion. Its assumption (so unlike those of the Western city, which
seems to live entirely in its past) is that ‘now’ is important, but
‘now’ lies well within the framework of the accepted concept of
permanence-within-continual-change. Tokyo’s buildings are con-
sequently always new and yet, in this sense, always the same.

51
 Which kind of city best suits human beings is a question that
must be answered individually. Certainly, Tokyo with its villages
and towns inside the central city, its convenience, its very non-
centralization, fits a society where the family and other social units
remain important. At the same time, its systems of public trans-
portation make travelling from one section of this enormous city to
another both possible and comfortable. Tokyo is one of the few
major cities where one does not want to own a car.
At the same time, Tokyo would seem to lack those architectural
monuments which speak so eloquently of timelessness, of immor-
tality, except, as we have seen, in the very concept of timeless
impermanence that the Japanese city has incorporated into itself.
Western visitors are thus presented with an anomaly when they
visit a city such as Tokyo. They cannot detect the natural and
organic form of the city because structural logic has no place in
such a form, yet they find an anthropomorphosed city in that
the more-than-human is unstressed and the merely human is
emphasized.
Nor is Tokyo, despite its seeming modernity, a city that makes
Western assumptions. That one often cannot locate an address
without outside (police, postman, local resident) help would indi-
cate that it is not in any Western sense an efficient urban complex.
As D. J. Enright wisely remarked, though in another context, ‘Ambi-
guity interests the Japanese a good deal more than does logic.’
Indeed, much is illogical and inefficient. Kurt Singer, speaking
of the Japanese language, noticed that it is so rich in ambiguities
that ‘. . . nobody deplores the resulting measure of haziness. It is by
higher degrees of clarity and precision that the Japanese would feel
inconvenienced.’
But then, logical efficiency as a noble virtue is not a Japanese
concept. Rather, efficiency is mundanely humanized. So is logic.
Conflicts, for example, are not battled out. They are eschewed:
‘Conflicting powers [Singer again] are reduced to ceremonial forms
allocated to well-defined places and times and occasions.’
Illogical, inefficient Tokyo will seem, despite initial strangeness,
somehow familiar, as visitors discover if they stay long enough.

53
They may realize that its pattern is that of their own home-towns, if
they come from a home-town small enough.

Each one of these small units from which this large city is made is
indeed a town. It feels like one. It acts like one.

10 March 1960. I go to my neighbourhood bath and stay a long

time. I am very fond of it; it is the nearest thing to church, to the
barber’s, to a family.
They are all more or less alike, these baths, one to every neigh-
bourhood, there must be thousands in Tokyo: a large barn-like
building, tall chimney attached which begins smoking about
two in the afternoon and continues to midnight. Inside, the
building is divided into four equal-sized rooms. The back two
(the baths) have a half-wall between; front two have a partition
with a bath for the woman in charge so she can survey both sides
(men’s and women’s) at the same time. The clothes are left in
large baskets. Pay the money to the girl, sixteen yen; shampoo or
a razor are five yen each; usually carry your own soap and towel.
Most of the bathers hold their towels in front of them when
they go in; a habitual gesture; you see the same gesture in fully
dressed men when they are cold; they cover their genitals.
Originally I thought it was because of the girls working around
but it is not. They pay no attention to the men nor the men to
them. This is the country of the time and place for everything
and the bath is not the place for sex.
Foreigners are told that they must wash outside the big tile
baths, using the taps and little wooden buckets, and then get in.
Well, maybe foreigners do but the Japanese certainly don’t. On
cold nights, like tonight, they climb in all dirty and let the com-
munal water soak it off. At best the tap rinse is a mere token: feet,
hands, maybe balls, but not often.
Everyone says the Japanese aren’t dirty, that they are in
fact clean. Well, I suppose they are cleaner than many, but no
Japanese that I know bathes because he likes it. He bathes to get
warm usually (once out and covered up, the body heat remains

55
for the water is scalding) and he bathes to meet his friends. But
not, I think, to get any cleaner than anyone else. Certainly not
many bathe completely. Most men don’t skin back and wash;
and I have been told that women think it is immodest to get soap
up inside. Once the bath is over, too, the dirty underwear goes
right back on.
But it is nice in the bath and that is quite enough. You sit back
and scald. It is relaxing. Perhaps that is why, in the bath and turn-
ing lobster-red, Japanese will say things they would otherwise
not. Perhaps this is why one can always hear neighbourhood
gossip in the bath.
One sits back in water which doesn’t feel as dirty as it is only
because it is so hot, looks at the picture (all bathhouses have one,
a giant mural against the back wall, sometimes Western-type
scenes, castle and sailboat and deer, sometimes a Chinese palace,
not a Japanese castle in sight: all oil on tin and mildew), reads the
advertisements (Love Beauty Salon, Suzuki’s Expert TV Repair,
Fame Barber Shop), and listens to the gossip.
Today I learn that that nice Mrs Watanabe down the street
doesn’t know that that nice Mr Watanabe – glasses and a wen –
is keeping a girl young enough to be his daughter. Also learn
that the eldest Hamada boy (much given to body building, has
a bulging neck) is going to be the death of his parents, plays
around with girls, and him so careful of his body too. Then
someone says that if he had Mrs Watanabe around he’d keep
two girls; another, that with parents like that he wonders the
Hamada boy hadn’t run away years ago.
Maybe if I hadn’t been there I too would have had a defender
the day my grocer turned to a neighbour and said: ‘And that
foreigner, the one with all the hair; you know he never pulls
down the blinds . . . well, the other night’ – but just then he saw
me bending forward with interest. I wanted to find out what had
happened just the other night but he sank deeper into the hot
water until just his eyes showed.
Once out of the tub then everyone washes (my soap at present
is Chlorophyll Cow) using skeleton of sponge and a kind of

57
 pumice stone on the hands and feet. My towel has naked ladies
on it which is always good for a conversation or two.
Here the attitude towards sex is representative. No people
have it more firmly in place. They are a bit puritan sometimes,
and a number of prudes exist, but there is no people less prurient.
What they are prurient about is money. Some Japanese treat
money as we treat sex. But, as for sex – well, there are no young
bloods trying to peek over the partition.
Talk to a number of people this evening. One old man says:
‘Say, there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. Are there
lots of Indians left? Hear you’ve been having some trouble with
them.’ But it turns out he thought Indians and Negroes were the
same thing. A little child comes up and spits water at me, then I
remember that sometime back I taught him how to squirt it with
his hands. Can’t use his hands properly and so the inventive
child uses his mouth.

While strolling the streets of the city, descending as it were into its
various sections, the large towns within the city – Asakusa, Ueno,
Ginza, Shinjuku – let us for a moment search out the old, what is
left of it, to sense it as W. E. Griffes did when he first saw the city
in 1870:

To feel that for ages millions . . . have lived and loved, enjoyed
and suffered and died, living the fullness of life, yet without the
religion, laws, customs, food, dress and culture which seems to
us to be the virtuals of our social existence, is like walking
through a living Pompeii.

Of buildings, very few – none I think from Tokugawa times except

for the Toshogu Shrine in Ueno, left over from 1650, and a small
temple or two now occupying a gentrified little park beside the
Asakusa Kannon Temple. Nor would one expect many such remains,
not with the many fires, earthquakes and bombings of this century.
At the same time, there are definite remains of another sort.
The architect Maki Fumihiko has demonstrated how contemporary
Tokyo retains a surprising amount of its nineteenth-century Edo

58
framework. The pattern of roads remains basically unchanged,
and the groups of self-contained ‘towns’ – conforming to the city’s
topography – remain true to their Edo-period antecedents.
Edward Seidensticker has said that the High City changed
less than the Low City, that class distinctions, once very clear if
measured by money, tended to disappear from the Low City but
remained in the High City. So also to a remarkable extent did the
pattern of land usage, the distribution of property between the
affluent and the more straitened: ‘In both parts of the city the street
pattern, despite revolution and disaster, has continued to resemble
that of Edo.’
Jinnai Hidenobu, in his ‘spatial anthropology’ of Tokyo, found
that new forms were reset on inherited space and ‘developed as a
modern city squarely atop this old structure . . . the essential fea-
tures of Edo urban forms passed on unaltered’. And Tange Kenzo,
creator of Tokyo’s most extreme modern building, the Metropolis-
like City Hall in Shinjuku, believes that ‘. . . everywhere you go in
Tokyo, traditions and preferences of past generations – particularly
those of the Edo period – exist side by side with the Japanese prefer-
ence for the avant garde and whatever is chic.’
Tokyo, then, follows its old ways. So do many cities. London, for
example. After the fire of 1666, at least six city plans (including one
by Christopher Wren and another by John Evelyn) were produced
and none were used, at least not by London. One of them ended
up becoming Philadelphia, and Major Pierre l’Enfant’s plan for
Washington owed much to Wren’s for London.
As Nikolaus Pevsner noted, the ‘failure’ of Wren and the other
planners meant that London still follows its medieval (even Saxon)
street patterns. As does Tokyo. And in the sinuous curving of Tokyo’s
elevated highway system, one may still trace the routes of vanished
streams and moats.
A difference is that, unlike London or Paris, early nineteenth-
century Tokyo had much open space. These park-like enclosures
were often the estates of the various daimyo, and, when the Toku-
gawa regime at last collapsed, they became government property
to be turned over or sold to private owners. Both the New Otani

60
and the Akasaka Prince hotels occupy hilltop daimyo estates; most
of the Tokyo university campuses are from daimyo or upper-level
samurai property. In a remarkably short time, all of these areas were
filled up, and Tokyo remains a city with very little open park space
– though it has more than even more crammed Osaka.
Searchers for the old in Tokyo will thus discover some battered
evidence. One such remain, now so compromised that it might be
considered a paradigm, is Nihombashi, the Nippon Bridge. This
structure, located along the upper stretches of what is now the Ginza,
was originally so important a place that all distances in Japan were
measured from it. It retained this importance until the age of the
automobile, which in Japan began well after the Second World War.
One may now view the melancholy but instructive results.
The bridge must be read as geological strata. At the bottom is
what is left of the canal which the structure bridges. Once a small
river, it is now channelled and straightened and forgotten. Some-
where down there are the stone ponts of the Edo-period bridge.
On top of these, still visible, is the 1911 bridge, cast metal with
ornamental unicorns and ‘Korean’ dogs (metaphors for West and
East) sitting around its lampposts. Over it all roars the present
century, an elevated highway which misses the heraldic beasts by
mere metres and renders the bridge all but invisible in the sense
that no-one notices it, eclipsed as it is by the vaunting of the over-
head traffic. It is, in the archaeological sense, a remain: an historical
sandwich.
To this extent, then, Edo remains visible – in the bone structure
and, occasionally, in a petrified protrusion like Nihonbashi. Tradi-
tion is more visible in other areas of endeavour – in food, the
language, in attitudes – and there is enough of it that one may still
agree with George Curzon’s 75-year-old definition of Japan as ‘a
country of feverish proficiency in many of the habits of advanced
civilizations with uncompromising relics of feudal crystalization’.
Except that Japan is itself now ‘advanced’.

In fact, it is so ‘advanced’ that Tokyo has become one of the most

spectacular of modern cities in that it appears much more ‘modern’

61
than Paris, London or even Las Vegas. We have seen why this should
be so; we will now look at some of the results. First, however, some
opinion.
Despite the fact that most Japanese seem to want to live in
Tokyo, not all of them have a high opinion of the place. This cool-
ness began quite early, around 1021, when the Lady Sarashina
described crossing the Sumida in her diary, on her way back to
Kyoto. ‘We are in Musashi [where Edo was to be located],’ she
wrote, ‘a province without a single charming place to recommend
it.’ In the early 1920s, Kafu visited the Musashi suburbs and found
‘a jumble of houses for rent and little factories, packed in quite
without order – the unsightliness is even worse than the worst parts
of the city proper’.
And in Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters, one of the sisters goes to
Second-World-War Tokyo and believes that after Osaka or Kyoto
it looks like ‘a rude, unfinished frontier community’ somewhere
further north, ‘or even Manchuria’.
Tanizaki’s quarrel with Tokyo was well known. In Diary of a Mad
Old Man, he has his protagonist say of the post-war city (in Howard
Hibbett’s translation):

I don’t like the Tokyo of today . . . Who made Tokyo into such
a miserable, chaotic city? Weren’t they all boorish, country-
bred politicians unaware of the good qualities of old Tokyo?
Weren’t those the men who turned our beautiful canals into
muddy ditches, men who never knew that whitebait swam in
the Sumida River.

Foreign observers have often been critical of Tokyo as well, what-

ever the era of their visit. In this they have subscribed to a hostility
to cities in general that was formed in the West early on. There
have been numerous city haters, including William Morris, Oswald
Spengler, Friedrich Engels and George Orwell. City lovers have
tended to give places bad names as well – witness Walt Whitman’s
effusive discovery that New York was ‘a continued exaltation and
absolute fulfillment’. A more temperate urban view was that of Lewis
Mumford. He saw ‘sprawl and shapelessness as an inevitable by

63
product of immensity’, but then went on to suggest that sprawl and
immensity were not entirely undesirable.
An early visitor to Japan, Isabella Bird, would have had none
of that. Noting that the country’s highest creed consisted of bald
materialism – ‘material good its goal’ – she went on to observe: ‘It is
singular that the Japanese who rarely commit a solecism in their
own national costume, architecture or decorative arts, seem to be
perfectly destitute of perception when they borrow ours.’
Japan’s sprawl was rendered even more ugly in that it was not
even Japanese sprawl. It was an imitated Western sprawl. Henry
Norman heard a diplomat say, ‘Japan, you see, is a bad translation.’
Later still, Lincoln Steffins wrote: ‘Sometimes it looks as if Japan
were created as a satire on and for Western civilization.’
An implication of this is that modern Japan is in bad taste.
Without enquiring too closely into the foundations of that agree-
ment known as good taste, one can say that a known kind of bad
taste clearly proliferates. This is of the sort which the West calls
kitsch.
Indeed, Japan is a kingdom of kitsch and Tokyo is its kapital. Mt
Fuji ends up as a tissue dispenser, and the Buddha’s sandals – three
metres high – adorn a ferro-concrete temple pretending to be timber.
Here the food in restaurant windows, more mouth-watering than
real food, is made of plastic; here the Fontana de Trevi in plaster
fronts a designer-elevator high-rise; here record shops soberly sell a
CD transcription of Le Sacre du printemps for solo guitar.
These objects all have kitsch in common. The dictionary offers
that the term derives from kitschen (1860), ‘to cheapen’, and a later
authority says that its attributes invariably include an adaptation
from one medium to another: wood-imitation wallpaper, the ‘con-
venience’ hotel built to resemble Windsor Castle; Tomita’s synthe-
sized ‘edition’ of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe. Another quality, it is
said, is that kitsch always represents an effort to diminish scale and
reduce functional activities to domestic terms – as in the Fuji tissue
dispenser.
But to cheapen also means to make more economical. Making
small, making standard, indeed making in traditional Japanese

64
style. Tatami mats, shoji doors, always in predetermined sizes,
created affordable Japanese architecture; microchips, always in mod-
ular sizes, now create affordable Japanese electronics. And Japanese
digital technology now makes things even smaller.
In this most pragmatic of nations, everything must be for imme-
diate use. Architecturally, this means that a pure style (if there is any
such) would be too limiting (in terms of time, space and energy) for
domestic use. How much more practical to miniaturize, to diversify,
to combine. More information in less space, as on a silicon chip.
That any original integrity has been violated is no-one’s concern,
nor is the fact that the result is often kitschy. Indeed, the Japanese
language has no word for kitsch. Nor would one expect it to. To
quote an old Japanese proverb, ‘Fish have no word for water.’
Thus modern Tokyo is a glorious architectural confusion of plastic
tile and fake wood, of Corinthian columns and chrome pylons,
dormer windows and polarized glass, half-timber and red-brick
paste-on fronting, sheet steel, translucent paper, textured lucite.
Any precision of architectural message is of course lost, though the
results are impressively loud.
Loud though it may be, the message is garbled, because neither
Japanese sender nor Japanese receiver can read it. A Tokyo person
cannot know the nexus that contributes the meaning of the
Massachusetts dormer window any more than a New Yorker can
hold that mass of recollection which makes a shrine’s torii gateway
meaningful.
Brass ivy adorning fake New Orleans fretwork; a monster stadium
disguised as a Big Egg; a plastic advertising gorilla wearing the Stars
and Stripes; a wedding cake of a building selling bridal costumes; lots
of big roof-top Venuses de Milo and Statues of Liberty. Their state-
ments are unintelligible, but they are also disarming, diverting and
even, if you squint, witty. Also, they are resolutely modern.
In fact, that is what this mélange says, its single intelligible state-
ment: ‘I am modern.’ This is because the world at large is, in this late
Hellenistic time of ours, enamoured of kitsch. Call it post-modernism
or what you will; it has become artistically respectable. A taste for
kitsch is a taste for the times.

67
 This was foreseen by an eminent observer, the novelist Hermann
Broch, who, back in 1933, stated that ‘. . . all periods in which values
decline are kitsch periods.’ However, he was not thinking of Japan
nor could he have been, because in this area Japan had no standards
from which to decline.
Though there were standards in traditional Japan, there were
never standards for foreign imports. As Percival Lowell recognized
over a century ago, ‘. . . the Japanese have been a nation of importers,
not of merchandize, but of ideas.’ In its importing of attitudes, Japan
was avant-garde, as it were, in its early appreciation of foreign kitsch.
For example, it recognized early on the beauty and utility of that
nineteenth-century Belgian import, the Manneke Pis. This attractive
youngster now relieves himself in most Japanese cities, usually in the
form of a public fountain and often with an ensemble of appropriate
costumes changes, all respectably civic in intention – a fireman’s
uniform, a policeman’s uniform.
Now, of course, traditional taste itself, unintelligible to the
young, has been crafted into something new. These dead canons
are the basis of the ‘Japanesque’, in itself a newer sub-species of
kitsch. Holy sutras are printed in gold on neckties, one enters the
latest disco through a chrome torii gateway, and Seibu’s Roppongi
Wave Building has a holograph image of Jizo, a Buddhist patron.
The confusion of styles that is typical of po-mo kitsch allows one
to nullify the other. It is like a pousse-café, a rainbow of tastelessness.
There is no single flavour. Wandering in a smart Tokyo neighborhood
is like wandering in a box of Quality Street: everything is different,
everything tastes the same.

Which leads us to fashion, a phenomenon which, as Walter Benjamin

has told us, describes ‘the ritual by which the fetish Commodity
wishes to be worshipped’.
It is fitting, perhaps inevitable, that Japan should become associ-
ated with high fashion. One reason is that the country has always
been aware of the kind of transience that fashion emphasizes;
another is that novelty for its own sake has never been unfashion-
able. Still another is that after Japan’s long, enforced historical

68
seclusion (fell asleep under Elizabeth, woke up under Victoria,
people used to say), the public went wild for newness. That some-
thing is new is recommendation enough; that it is new and on sale is
an enormous incentive – as witness the cries of ‘shin hatsubai’ (latest
product) on street and TV.
Edward Seidensticker has given us a listing of some Meiji fads.
These included, besides coffee and sea-bathing, a number of animal
fashions, among which was a passion for pigs, including the minia-
ture variety known as Nanking mice, and a major vogue for rabbits,
particularly calico ones. This continued until ‘. . . a person in Shitaya
was fined and jailed for staining a white rabbit with persimmon
juice.’
In a way, the animal passion continues. Just last year, the stores
were awash with tamagotchi: a virtual pet in the form of a compact,
portable computer game shaped like an egg (tamago) that one
‘watched’ ( gotchi being a kind of homonym for the English word.)
The instructions read: ‘You take care of Tamagotchi, the mysterious
small animal on the liquid crystal screen. The special feature is that
Tamagotchi will grow up in diverse ways, depending on how you
raise it.’
The computer image of an egg gave birth five seconds after a
button was pushed. The creature had a life expectancy of a week or
so and during this time constantly called for attention by means of a
beeping sound. The owner was required to feed it, to dispose of
its excrement, to play with it and to discipline it – all by pushing
various buttons. Its appearance and character were affected by the
degree of care it received. If not fed enough, it died of starvation;
if ignored, it turned delinquent. There were ways to make it old
(an oyajichi, displaying features of the middle-aged), and it could
always be reprogrammed to start all over again. There were Internet
pages that offered advice on how to make it reach an advanced age
(discipline it and feed it less, no matter how much it complains);
there was also dissident advice on how to kill the thing as quickly
and efficiently as possible.
Invented by a toy manufacturer who was pondering the mingling
of pets with toys, Tamagotchi became popular at once. Released at

70
the end of 1996, it sold millions of units and half a year later was
still being eagerly awaited by would-be buyers. These were initially
teenage girls, but eventually included everyone.
As an image, the Tamagotchi displayed differences from its
parents – digital games. It was not entirely presentational; it pre-
sumed a dialogue. The cute little encoded avians had to be cared
for. This, said some educators (as well as the Bandai Co. Ltd, which
makes the product), was a good thing. In the cities, the young are not
allowed pets; they do not learn the interdependence so necessary
for a healthy society. Tamagotchi teaches them responsibility.
Some owners, it was said optimistically, developed a parental
attachment to the chick that was as deep as that towards human
offspring. On television, a doctor – a grown man – said that when
his Tamagotchi passed away he was sadder than when one of his
patients died. An Internet home page displayed illustrations of
Tamagotchi tombstones and invited people to send valedictions to
be engraved on them.
There were other reasons for the product’s popularity, however.
Teenagers in all countries are notoriously under-empowered; their
entire culture is about ways to acquire adult power before their
time. With the tiny chick, they finally had something completely
under their thumbs. It survived based on decisions they made; it
died at their whim: indeed, it lived the kind of life they thought
they did, but it could do nothing about it. They could. They had
Tamagotchi.
That Tamagotchi became a craze is perhaps also indicative of
something other than mere popularity. In Japan more than in some
countries, everyone is supposed to look the same. If a new fashion
evolves (chapatsu – dyed hair; loose socks worn by girls; Burberry
scarves; puri-cura – print club, tiny stickers of one and one’s friends,
all beaming and holding up V-sign fingers), then you are out if you
do not have it. But even if you have it, there are crazes inside the
crazes. It was only the white Tamagotchi which (like the calico
rabbit) really counted.

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What is newer than fashion itself? Clothes. Fashion is the essence
of modernity, the only essence it owns. Take it away and we have
clothing, not fashion.
Another reason for the attention paid to high fashion is that
Japan standardizes radically. People tend to look alike (one hair
colour, unless it is dyed; only two eye colours, brown and black),
and so their natural appearance does not exhibit the physical diver-
sity seen in some Western countries. This is turned into a virtue,
and people dress alike as well: the navy-blue business suit, the
high-collared or middy-bloused school uniform, the occupational
clothes.
Fashionable clothing is thus a new uniform. Everyone wears the
same things, but the things themselves differ according to season or
designer whim. Last year, all fashionable youngsters had to wear
black, but only for a time; after that it was pastels: lilac, beige, putty.
This year, it’s something else.
One point is that all of this is new. Another is that everyone is
wearing it. One point does not cancel out the other because, in its
small way, each new fashion is also a protest. The latest thing, even
when worn by everyone at the same time, registers a small criticism
of whatever they all wore before. This sort of small protest is the
kind of criticism most popular in Japan. It is safe and yet, for a brief
time, lends a feeling of individuality.
Naturally, individuality is felt as strongly in Japan as elsewhere –
it is simply that it is expressed less directly. In a country moulded
by the group (three centuries of Tokugawa rule saw to that), indi-
viduals are expected to conform (unless they’re modern architects,
those token individuals), and so they often do. Thus does one
satisfy the demands of the social order.
Many Japanese find freedom in crowds because being anony-
mous is one way of achieving respite from the restraints of this
social order. Streets are often narrow, always crowded: Shinjuku at
night is New Year’s Eve anywhere else. To be a part of any group is
to be similar, and in Japan similarity is agreed upon as a virtue, as it
is in any feudal society. Despite surface democratization, many
Japanese are not particularly friendly to the idea of the individual,

72
as least not to ideal individuals, as Americans are purported to be.
This is reflected in the shape of the city itself, in the architectural
patterns of the country.
Kurt Singer observed that many (in his time, the 1930s, most)
Japanese learn to move ‘within a tightening set of restrictive rules’
which usually provide them with a structure. Western ‘freedom
for’ finds its equivalent in ‘constraint for’, and the resulting indi-
vidual is built to a common cut more openly and more often than
is thought usual in the West. This self-constructed ‘self’, which is
all that any of us can boast of by way of ‘personality’, seems, by
contrast, muted.
As it would if everyone wore the same thing, said the same thing
and, for all we know, thought the same thing. But none of this is so;
it is just that the majority make it seem so. Japanese individuals
express an individuality less apparent. One of the ways they do this
is through what they wear, and as we have seen one of the attrac-
tions of high fashion is that a statement of assent can be read as a
statement of criticism as well as a celebration of togetherness.
Let us look at a few of these fleeting fashions through extracts
from my journals:

September 22, 1992. I notice a change in women’s fashion, now

that fashion is ordained not only by the media, but by women
themselves. The ones I see are developing a new style. It consists
of more expensive materials arranged in more expensive ways.
Silks and velvets tucked and pleated, a torso swathed and looped.
These things cost money and are commensurate with the new
economic strength. I recall that when the West was consoli-
dating its financial position at the end of the last century women’s
clothing turned into expensive upholstery, labour intensive.
There is something else as well. The women are turning into
royalty. There is a lot of inset embroidery, gold plate, tassels and
cords, with crowns stitched onto the material. This makes the
women a bit overdressed as they buy eggs and tofu in my neigh-
bourhood supermarket. There is also a smart turn to the military
look – epaulets, aide-de-camp ribbon effects. I do not find this

74
sinister. It is a part of the look of royalty, of new power. All of this
is seen only in middle-class women, all of them now dressed in a
particularly recognizable form of bad taste, the overtly ostenta-
tious. (The covertly ostentatious forms a different kind of bad
taste, that which is called good.) The further taste of the wealthy
and the fashion-conscious is different yet, it is still Issey Miyake
body bags and Comme des Garçons shrouds.
July, 7 1994. I look at summer fashions of the young. Those of
the male are most curious. Big heavy leather laced shoes, clod-
hoppers, have taken the place of last winter’s big heavy laced
track shoes. The shorts are of heavy jersey, with great wide leg
openings and consequent panoramas of thigh. With this is worn
a lettered T-shirt – one with an algebraic formula, another in the
Cyrillic alphabet, yet another, worn by a fresh-faced innocent,
with ‘I Am a Pervert’ on the back. Or the outfit consists of a
ragged dress shirt held together with safety pins and jeans which
have been carefully ripped at the knees suggesting some strenu-
ous labour which has, in fact, not been undertaken. All of these
soft-skinned kids are strangers to work. Their outfits cost money
and came from Harajuku. They are affecting the proletariat.
This, says Veblen, occurs where money seeps far down, accom-
panied by a like decline in standards. Romans in full fashion
dressing like Goths. All of this shabby finery looks strange in
Ueno, however, where the fashionable young must compete with
the real thing – bums with the knees of their pants honourably
worn through, homeless old women actually needing to safety-
pin their blouses.
December 15 , 1996. I wander around and look at the girls in
their Frankenstein boots and their elephant sox, and the boys
under their variously coloured thatch – blue is popular right now.
I also listen to people talking on their cellular phones . . . these
focus all attention in the ears rather than, as is customary on the
street, in the eyes. The users do not realize that they are spilling
their lives into the ears of the passers-by and if they did they
would not care.
I loiter near to hear what they are saying. They pay no attention.

75
Besides, if they do notice, they see merely a foreigner and
foreigners are famous for not knowing the language. So I feel like
Siegfried in the forest – understanding the language of the birds.
But this promiscuous telephoning can be dangerous. Last
night’s news told of a man using his phone on the platform as the
express rushed by. He was so intent on what he was saying that
he walked too close to the hurtling train, was drawn into it and
sucked onto the tracks where he made his final connection.
December 24, 1996. I walk the windy streets of Shibuya, a
territory now given over to the young. There they come in their
hordes, driven by fashion and their glands. Let me describe them
lest this motley show be lost forever.
Younger high-school girls wear their plaid skirts and sweaters
and their elephants sox, loose, baggy, white, which they say
makes their legs look thinner and often have to be held up with a
kind of glue which is especially made and sold over the counter.
They still sometimes wear old-fashioned braids but their manners
have been attuned to the times. In particular they cultivate a
loud, braying, humourless laugh which is supposed to indicate
a lack of docility. Among themselves they use male language
mistaking this for a kind of emancipation.
Older girls often wear very short skirts coupled with built-up
boots which reach the knee and thus offer an expanse of leg. With
this a long overcoat unbuttoned so that the thighs may flash.
Long dyed hair (chestnut, maple, mahogany) or streaked with
peroxide or henna, and brown pancake make-up with silvered
lipstick complete the ensemble.
It has a name. It is called kogaru – derived apparently from
kokosei garu (high-school girl), though the layered cut, the trimmed
eyebrows and the lipstick emulate the image of the older popular
singer Namie Amuro. Some of the girls show their navels in the
summer and often sport a ring in them.
Full piercing is seen mainly on the boys. Those in high school
wear eyebrow studs or lip studs as well as earrings. This with
jeans and lumberjack shirts (now firmly at the waist since the
pubic-hair-showing groin-look is out of fashion) and boots with

76
thick soles, and lots of rings. Boys in Shibuya are more decorated
than the girls are.
Along with this a new vocabulary. Saiko and saitei for best and
worst are out. In is choberiba for very bad and choberigu for very
good. I do not know the derivation of these. Another new word
is makudurama which can mean anything from a big sports event
to a big rock concert to a big TV spectacular. Continuing into the
new year is a teenage passion for purikura, photo stickers made
in three minutes showing you and your friend wearing funny
hats, grinning, making the V-sign, with which you can decorate
your school locker or your letters, if you send any.
Back in Ueno, only twenty minutes on the subway, is another
world. Here the young are more scarce and are not overly given
to body piercing nor wearing work clothes as a fashion indicator.
Here the work clothes are seen on the working young, but
mainly on people who are older, and poorer. Much less shopping
going on. In the station lines of old men, indigent, homeless,
sitting on the pavement. I pass two in noisy conversation. One
drunkenly tells the other: ‘Issen mo nai’n da yo’ (I don’t have a
penny), yet he must have had at least several to get this drunk.
15 March, 1997. I come back late from teaching my class
and find the back streets of Ueno awash with beautiful young
women, all in the epaulets and monograms, brocades and
miniskirts that signify the mizushobai service, all from bars
named Etoile and Hope which cost an amount of money. Money
is now not to be had, however, and so they have come outside,
like exotic insects from under their rocks, and – very ill at ease in
their indoor finery – stand in the open night air, hand out leaflets
and cajole.
They are joined by the homeless who are bedding down for
the night, on cardboard in front of banks, or curled up in the
little niche by the porno. A piquant combination: long tanned
legs next to dirty shoes and sockless feet; much-brushed hair,
stained fashionable mahogony or deep maple side by side with
dirty, lank, infested strands; the smell of Chanel mingling with
that of the rotgut the homeless take to put themselves to sleep.

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 June 9, 1997. A sunny, summer Sunday, lots of people out in
the city, including the new breed: the nubile moneyed. They are
there in designer duds (Ralph Lauren is favoured), loose white
sox, pleated miniskirts, if they are still students; if not, platform
shoes, frosty lipstick, streaked dyed hair (brown), no more Vuitton
bags, Fendi now. They stroll in groups buying things. Tama-
gotchi is now de trop, since they are selling them at supermarkets,
so everyone has one and the fad is over. But Print Club (a digital
camera machine which makes multiple tiny snapshots of them
and their friends) is still in. Perhaps this is because the company
which makes the machine, Atlas, has also emblazoned its slogan:
‘People with lots of our photos are happiest, but people who
aren’t popular cannot collect many.’ Therefore, those with most
of these photos are most popular and hence happiest. To show
how happy they are these young women have cultivated a deep,
loud, mirthless laugh which is used constantly, and have ampli-
fied ordinary noise-making into something like menace. You can
hear them coming.
One way to read all this is by what is not there – that is, males.
All this is something for girls to do now that boys are hopeless:
they are all tied up with expectations (the job), they are zombied
out (video games, porn tapes), they can’t talk, they can’t think,
they just aren’t much fun. But we girls, we know how to have
fun: we giggle, we scream, we have our pictures taken by the
hundreds, we shop – here we come.

As one gathers, fashion is not only clothing, but clothing is only

fashion. Also one sees a certain consistency. Just as the iki, the truly
chic, in Edo were centred around the whorehouse (dignified by
other terminology but a whorehouse nonetheless) – what they
wore, what you wore, what they talked about, what you talked
about – so the new kogaru fashion was brought to prominence by
the activities of these high-school girls, some of whom also engaged
in enjo kosai, a term that has been euphemistically translated as
‘compensated dates’.

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Style is how you express yourself, how you say things, how you
present the real you. Rémy de Gourmont once said that trying to
define style was like trying to put a sack of flour in a thimble, but
another Frenchman, André Bazin, suggested that it was more
simple: style was a pattern of selection, and what you chose was
what you were.
In the case of cities, the chosen pattern is often contradictory.
Rome’s is a combination of the ancient (Imperial Rome) and the more
recently elegant (Armani, Valentino, Gucci); London’s is a combina-
tion of probity (the House of Lords, Westminster Abbey) and trendy
(‘swinging-city’ punk). Tokyo style is also a combination of opposites.
Tokyo’s self-identification is exemplified by ‘trad but mod’, the
city’s ubiquitous slogan found on shop-fronts, T-shirts and carrier
bags. The capital insists on its traditions: a few early nineteenth-
century Edo-period buildings, the Imperial Palace, the more and
more gentrified Low City. ‘Established in 1995’ is carved in granite
on a recent emporium. At the same time, as five minutes in the city
will convince you, Tokyo insists on its modernity.
It always has. For a century now, Tokyo had been known as the
‘city of contrasts’ or the ‘capital of the old and the new’. Ever since
its opening up to the outside world in the middle of the last century,
Tokyo has with increasing skill combined East and West, past and
present.
The case is complicated, however, because Japan has long been
‘modern’ in that it was largely responsible for the international
modern style. Architect Richard Rogers, the man liable for Paris’s
Centre Pompidou, has said that the whole modern movement
sprang directly from architects ‘looking at things like the Katsura
Detached Palace’ – an example of Japanese architecture at its most
geometric. And the poet Henri Michaux, in Tokyo in 1932, noted
that ‘the Japanese have been modern for ten centuries,’ that ‘. . .
Tokyo is a hundred times more modern than Paris.’
When the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky wanted a city
of the future in Solaris, he brought his camera to Tokyo’s Akasaka-
Mitsuke. Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles of the future in Blade Runner
was conceived after the director had seen night-time Shinjuku.

81
 The air of the new in Tokyo is, in addition (unlike that in the
Scott film), benign. Contented people walk about wearing Discman
earphones; they use plastic cards for just about everything; they
wait for traffic lights. And it all works: public phones are never out
of order, automatic dispensers (beer, saké, soft drinks, magazines,
condoms, sandwiches, hot dinners) actually dispense. And every-
thing is for sale: mangoes, slivovitz, the complete CD’d Schönberg
quartets, durian, bidets, Demal chocolates. Consumerism gone
mad is the Tokyo way of life, and the materialist paradise is now –
the conclusion of H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come has been
reached.
Tokyo’s façade is, as a result, resolutely contemporary. Though
the Japanese like the cozy (the domestic labyrinths), they do not,
unlike Londoners, incorporate these into their official attempts at
style. Rather, keeping up with the Suzukis, they always put their
best economic foot forward.
Hence perhaps another reason for the enormous rate of archi-
tectural turnover in Tokyo and, because of a presumed newness,
the use of Western models in the buildings built. Bastardizing
European style has for over a century been the Japanese way, and
Tokyo is studded with early examples: Tokyo Station, a brick edifice
that would look perfectly at home in Amsterdam; the Akasaka
Detached Palace, which would fit into Vienna without a single
comment. Now, with the ratification of the post-modern, influences
from East and West swarm in the capital – Babylonian, Baroque and
Bel-Air Moderne grouped incongruously together.
Such promiscuous clusterings come naturally to a culture that
does not know what the original alluded to and does not care,
that uses others’ idioms to suit its own meanings, and that is never
troubled by having to observe the integrity of any original.
For the pedestrian foreigner, much of Tokyo’s frenetic carnival
flavour is due to familiar things being used in unfamiliar ways.
There is a kind of freedom in finding that Doric columns don’t
mean banks, nor red roof tiles, Spain. The feeling of being at liberty
in Tokyo is occasioned by this ‘illiteracy’. There is no telling what
anything means.

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 And all of this awash in the great flowing current, the people of
Tokyo – a tide, diurnal, nocturnal, always sweeping through this
unfinished po-mo-but-trad labyrinth of a place.

In Tokyo, one is reminded of another urban concept. I sometimes

wonder why the Japanese went to all the trouble of franchising a
Disneyland in the suburbs when the capital itself is in many ways
so superior a version. Let us look into some of the resemblances.
Disneyland, and the other lands it has spawned, is based on the
happy thought of geographical convenience: all of the interesting
localities on earth – African rivers and Swiss mountains, Caribbean
islands and American towns – located in one spot. One is seeing,
one feels, the world in miniature and, indeed, ‘It’s a Small World’ is
the slogan of one of the concessions.
Compare this to Tokyo today. There are hundreds of American
fast-food stands, dozens of red-lacquered Chinese restaurants and
equal numbers of white-stuccoed Italian ones; there are thousands
of boutiques with famous foreign names printed all over them
(Gucci, Dior, Yves St-Laurent, Arnold Palmer); there is an imitation
Baker Street straight from London; the Museum of Western Art in
Ueno has Rodin casts in the front yard; and there is an onion-
domed Russian Orthodox cathedral.
In the resulting stew, even the authentically Japanese takes on
a pleasantly ersatz flavour. Thus the old Toshogu Shrine in Ueno, a
real Edo relic, appears in Tokyo’s Disneyland context just as pleas-
ingly synthetic as does the new Japanese modern-style restaurant
gotten up almost right as a French bistro. Old and new, Tokugawa
remains and new Heisei structures, Tokyo in its entirety resembles
Disneyland on a mammoth scale, with an area of nearly 2,500 square
kilometres and a working staff of over twelve million.
The reason, of course, is that Japan is the real home of all those
concepts which Disneyland has come to exemplify. It is in Japan,
after all, that the notion of the microcosm was most fully elaborated
– from its beginnings right down to Walkman baby loudspeakers
for the ears, wristwatch TV’s and the smallest and fastest silicon
chip ever.

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 Japan has always displayed a fondness for the geographical
microcosm as well, the bringing together of famous places in a
single locality. In the far suburbs, there is an attraction called the
Tobu World Square where one may view scale models of over a
hundred of the world’s most famous buildings. The Taj Mahal is
next to the Empire State Building, which is next to St Peter’s, which
is next to the Eiffel Tower, and so on. All are complete down to the
smallest visible detail – indeed, they were made by the Toho Eizo
Bijutsu, the people who gave us Godzilla.
Many small towns in Japan sport a Ginza, a hopeful replica of
what was once Tokyo’s most famous shopping street; many gardens
have a little Mt Fuji, small but climbable, included among the
attractions. The classical Japanese garden itself gives an indication
of how attractive the microcosmic impulse has been for centuries
and how early the Japanese perfected these small, visitable worlds.
Take, for example, the Korakuen in Tokyo, an Edo-period garden.
One climbs a small hill which calls itself Mt Lusha (from China) and
finds oneself at a replica of the Togetsu Bridge in Kyoto’s Arashiyama
district, except that the view is not of the river but of a famous lake
in Hangzhou. We are back in China again, but not for long. Climb
another tiny hill and here is Kyoto once more, the veranda platform
of the Kiyomizu Temple, one of the most famous sights of the city.
Some Edo gardens are even more Disneyland-like – Tokyo’s
Rikugien for example. Here, in one place, arranged somewhat like a
miniature golf-course, are most of the 88 agreed-upon canonical
sites, all tiny and all with notice-boards explaining the Chinese or
Japanese associations.
Such examples are found everywhere. Lest it be thought, how-
ever, that these are just examples of big-city, late Edo commer-
cialism, Japan’s claim to early Disneyfication might be defended by
mentioning Kyoto’s elegant Katsura Villa, one of the inspirations
for the Bauhaus and the modern style in architecture. Here the
garden is a hodge-podge of famous scenic attractions from else-
where: the Sumiyoshi pine, the Tsutsumi waterfall, the Oigawa
river and Ama no Hashidate, the famous wooded spit of land on
the other side of Japan.

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 Kyoto’s elegant moss garden, that of Saiho-ji, contains – if one
knows how to find them – scenes from ten famous places, repro-
ductions of ten famous things (rocks, etc.), ten poetic references and
ten famous pine trees. Even Ryoan-ji’s famous ‘Zen’ rock garden
has Disney aspirations. Those rocks are more than just rocks. They
are manifestations of the infinite, or they are islands in the ocean;
they are a section of the famous Inland Sea, or (a very Disney touch)
they are a mother tiger and her frolicking cubs.
The famous twelfth-century Byodo-in is a replica of a Chinese
water pavilion, with imitation Chinese swan-boats (phoenixes,
actually) being poled and pushed about. And the earliest Kyoto
garden (c. 800), the Shinsen-en, is still a replica of Sukhavati, the
Western Paradise of the Buddha Amitabha. Those rocks in the pond
are the three islands of the blessed – Horai, Hojo and Eishu. And
that big rock in the middle is Mt Sumera itself. So, more than a
thousand years ago the Japanese had already constructed Space
Mountain.
It is thus evident that the Japanese claim to pre-Disney Disney-
fication is a strong one. No other country has brought the principle
of the microcosm – in ikebana, bonsai, chanoyu and gardens, to
mention only its earlier manifestations – to such profuse perfection.

Umberto Eco believes that ‘. . . real cities redeem, in their context,

even what is architectonically ugly.’ He holds that ‘. . . perhaps in
New York the Ca’ d’Zan of Sarasota [, New York] would be accept-
able, just as in Venice, on the Grand Canal, so many sibling-palazzos
of the Ca’ d’Zan are acceptable.’ He has said that ‘. . . a good urban
context and the history it represents teach, with a sense of humour,
even kitsch how to live, and thus exorcize it.’ Well, maybe. It would
be interesting to see how he would explain Japan’s rural experi-
ments in the various ‘lands’ that now spot the landscape.
Most of these lands have foreign themes, perhaps because, as
travel writer Cleo Paskal has written,

. . . today’s Japanese tourists don’t want to be bothered by the

horror, not to mention the expense and trouble, of the real thing.

86
 They want a New York they can visit for a weekend, and a
London where everyone speaks Japanese. They want a sanitized
Japanese version of the rest of the world – a virtual vacation.

Japan created an early virtual world in Sasebo’s Holland Village, an

island-built replica of Deshima, that man-made offshore island
which was, perforce, home of the first foreigners, and it was here
that the Japanese could easily visit a part of their own culture. So
popular was this venture that the parent company later opened up
Huis Ten Bosch, a land of canals, windmills, tulips and wooden
shoes. There are ‘European-style’ hotels, and those who wish to can
buy on-site Dutch houses right in the park and live the life of the
Netherlandish burgher without leaving Japan.
There is, naturally, none of the dinge and danger of, say, Amster-
dam. The original Dutchmen could view Japan from Deshima as
spectacle; now the Japanese can view Holland as spectacle from the
comfort and safety of their own land. During its first year, Huis Ten
Bosch had nearly four million well-paying customers.
Shortly thereafter, Ashibetsu in Hokkaido – having lost its coal-
mining industry – decided to go into the theme-park business.
Canada World opened – Japan’s largest lavender field, a complete
St Edward’s Island-like ‘Anne of Green Gables’ Land and seven
resident Canadians quilting, playing the fiddle and chopping wood.
In Niigata’s Russian Village, one may, without the difficulty and
danger of actually visiting Russia, see Suzdai Cathedral, eat pirozhki,
drink borsch and enjoy a folk-song-and-dance troupe and the
talents of three performing seals direct from Lake Baikal.
Over in Shingomura in Aomori, you may also visit the last
resting-place of Jesus Christ. It was actually his brother, Iskiri, who
was crucified, you see. Christ himself escaped to Japan, where he
married a Shingomura woman named Yumiko, had three daughters
and lived to a happy 106 years of age. His ‘descendants’ opened this
‘Christ’s Tomb’ tourist attraction.
Then there is Nixe Castle in Noboribestsu, a full-scale replica of
the castle and home-town of Hans Christian Andersen; Shuzenji’s
Britain Land, a slice of seventeenth-century British countryside

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complete with homes and shops; and Portopialand in Kure, which
includes much of Portugal’s Costa del Sol in some form or other.
Plus a number of New-Zealand-Valleys in Hiroshima, Yamaguchi
and Shikoku, which specialize in sheep shows (an exotic entertain-
ment in non-mutton-eating Japan), and the Tochigi Edomura, Hello
Kitty Land, Yomiuri Land, the Yokohama Wild Blue and the Chiba
Hawaiian Centre (with wave machine), etc. Here ‘kitsch’ may be
too weak a term. One must turn to Russian and suggest poshlost – a
word for the preposterously overdone, but overdone with no self-
knowlege, no irony.
Though the onlooker at any of these spectacles may be reminded
of Dr Johnson’s maxim that nothing is more hopeless than a scheme
of merriment, the financial success of these various artificial foreign
lands within the safe confines of Japan has proven their viability for
the Japanese.
After all, places like Canadian World actually let one become a
temporary Canadian, whereas if one visited Canada there would be
the constant reminder that one was actually a foreigner. Anyway,
foreign countries are just too foreign to be readily comprehensible.
These ‘translated’ versions are the best way of understanding them.

Whether enormous Tokyo does or does not lend authenticity to its

many virtual attractions (Eco’s idea) is perhaps a matter of opinion.
What is more certain is the role that these attractions have always
played in the excitement, the vitality and, yes, the charm of the
place. The frivolities of Edo and the trivia of Tokyo create in large
part the sheer pleasure this city purveys.
The first foreign visitors to the country were fond of comparing
it to some childlike wonderland and its inhabitants to children.
Such adjectives as ‘wee’ and ‘quaint’ were used to delineate these
qualities; Victor Hugo himself said that Japan was ‘a child of the
world’s old age’.
Assumptions of cultural superiority may account for some of
these expressions (as well as rapacious imperial designs: children are
easy to subdue), but at the same time, some of the observations are
apt. There is something childlike, if not childish, about the country.

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 This is perhaps because many Japanese (like many other peoples)
find constant reminders of childhood satisfying and are more open
than many other peoples about it. The attractions of childhood are
manifest. It is, after all, a time of safety, security, closeness. Various
approximations offer a kind of return to this blessed state.
This may account for the fact that adults read comic books, that
childish forms of address (chan) are used by grown-ups, that bar
hostesses are supposed to mother, and that parents go to Disney-
land just as frequently as children.
Then too there is the eternal vogue for the cute, the kawaii. The
police box at Sukiyabashi is done up in Hansel und Grethel ginger-
bread-house fashion, a doll’s house with uniformed dolls. The
new Minato Ward Office with its toyland colors and doll-house
furniture looks like a home for Barbie and Ken. That cute animal,
the panda, is so beloved that no-one found it strange when the
announcer on NHK, the major government TV station, broke down
on announcing the death of one of the beasts at the Ueno zoo.
One might mention, too, the aural atmosphere of the place. Was
ever a country, I wonder, so fond of the celesta, the musical box, the
upper register of the piano? You wait on the phone and are fed Für
Elise on the musical box. In the ‘bullet train’, all announcements are
preceeded by a phrase on the musical bells. The celesta is heard
before NHK announcements, and every station on the circular
Yamanote Line in Tokyo has its own musical ‘theme’, played on the
upper reaches of an electronic carillon.
What is this din except the sound of childhood itself – the merry
pealing of little bells which we associate with being very young.
The cloying sweetness of the celesta, the clinging tones of the musi-
cal box – these are the sounds of a childhood captured because it
was never lost.
These, and a thousand other things, initially so enchant visitors
from abroad and make it difficult for them to take Tokyo seriously.
One has too good a time there; one feels so much younger.

Younger in several senses. We are in Tokyo sometimes returned to a

stage in our development we had almost forgotten, when we were

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so young that few of the inhibitions we later learned had as yet
intruded. Each and every one of us still retains an element of what
Freud in his fancy way labelled the polymorphously perverse. Let
me explain – but this will take a little time, so perhaps a detour is in
order. We will walk around the block while I elucidate.
Edward Saïd has said:

The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home, the more
easily is one able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with
the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true
vision. The more easily, too, does one assess oneself and alien
cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance.

Quite so, and the urge to intimacy is indeed tempered by the fact of
distance. The foreign visitor will have discovered the difference,
one rendered doubly dramatic in that so much that appears
Western has been revealed as Western only in appearance: finding
in the shoe department something one does not know, looking in
the carpenter shop and locating nothing you recognize, eating the
Western meal and discovering Japanese viands – for this is the land
where even McDonald’s sells rice cakes.
The result is a pleasing confusion and a realization that one is, in
this country, free of one’s own mores and still more or less immune
to those of the Japanese. A part of the pleasurable distance is that
exceptions are made for the foreigner, the gaijin. There is, indeed, an
entire Japanese system of exemptions for foreigners.
This results in the ultimate liberty of finding everything other
than oneself. Walking down the street, one experiences the free-
dom of being manifestly different. The foreigner was stared at for
well over 150 years. Early accounts all mention this, and until
the massive influx of foreigners in the 1980s it was still the case.
You became used to it, and eventually irritation turned to need.
No matter what the people truly thought, you were treated like
a star.
Quickly, however, the traveller discovered that Japan insisted
that the star keep its distance. Those living in Tokyo were expected
to move to Roppongi or Aoyama or Azabu – a move towards High

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City ghettoization. There one sometimes found that paradigm of
intimacy and distance: the marriage between the foreign man who
wanted in and the Japanese woman who wanted out. And yet,
though he desired intimacy, Japan was teaching him to keep his
distance. (If the foreigner had been yellow or black instead of white
– or pink – the lesson would have been harsher and the imposed
distance greater.)
Another country, says Alastair Reid, an authority on the subject,
is another self. One is regarded as different, and so one becomes
different – two people at once. Look at me. I was a native of Ohio
who knew only the streets of little Lima, and I am also an expatriate
who knows the streets of mighty Tokyo. Consequently, I can com-
pare these places. And since the act of comparison is the act of
creation, I am able to learn about both.
I am also free from prejudices of class and caste. I cannot detect
them, and no-one attempts to detect them in me since my foreign-
ness is difference enough. I remain in a state of surprise, and this
leads to heightened interest and hence perception. Like a child with
a puzzle, I am forever putting pieces together and saying: ‘Oh’.
Or ‘naruhodo’, since I have for some time been learning Japanese.
And learning a language does indeed create a different person since
words determine facts. When I first arrived, I was an intelligence-
impaired person since I could not communicate and had, like a
child or an animal, to intuit from gestures, from intent, from expres-
sion. Language freed me from such elemental means of communi-
cation, but it also taught me a lesson I would not otherwise have
learned.
While it is humiliating to ideas of self to be reduced to what one
says (nothing at all if one does not know Japanese), this condition
teaches that there are other avenues than speech. It is like seeing a
foreign-language film without titles. I may not learn much about
the movie, but I learn a lot about film making.
What I am describing here is what any traveller, expatriate or
otherwise, knows, but the degree and the difference depend upon
the place and its culture. Japan tends to give foreigners a strong
jolt because the space between the distance kept and the intimacy

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implied is greater than in some other countries. Japan is still openly
xenophobic and at the same time has a need for the foreigner that
creates an oscillating dialectic – one that affects Japanese re: foreigners
almost as much as it affects foreigners re: Japanese.
From the Japanese point of view, the ideal arrangement is for the
foreign visitor to come, do his business, and get out. A foreigner
who elects to remain is cause for interest and concern. How often it
is implied that I would do better to go home. This is not unkind or
even inhospitable. People are reacting as they would were they
themselves in a foreign land. Many Japanese abroad want to return
to Japan, do not travel well, need miso soup, etc. They do not think
of others behaving differently in like situtations. ‘Where are you
from?’ asks the taxi driver. Told, he asks: ‘But you go home often
don’t you?’ Assured that I do, he is mollified.
Given the imposed distance, the apparent intimacy promised by
many Japanese becomes doubly attractive. The promise is, I think,
not intended. It is occasioned by a real desire to give the guest
pleasure, an inability to plainly say no, and a concern for gain.
This means that the foreigner is forever kept up in the air, be it in
a business deal or in a love affair. Sometimes, the emotions are iden-
tical. I heard a frustrated merger specialist complain about a failed
deal with this metaphor: ‘There I was, open like a flower . . .’
And the lone person, the person who does not speak the language
well, he who never spent his childhood in the culture – precisely
this newcomer is most in need of the intimacy that is dangled before
him, is always just around the corner.
That this need often takes sexual form is notorious. Travellers
almost by definition screw more (or want to screw more) than other
people. Partly, it is the freedom (‘No-one knows me here’), but
mostly it is the need to affirm self on the most basic level, that of
emotion. Also, sex is imperialistic since it always implies a top and a
bottom, and one of the ways to encompass (and subject) the distant
Other is through what is often called the act of love but in this
context should probably be called the act of sex.
When this urge meets the seemingly pliable ‘native’ with her or
his ‘different mores’, the result is a kind of infatuation. It can go

94
both ways, and often does. But the major consideration is that the
Japanese have to ‘live’ in their country, and foreigners cannot.
Foreigners are, says Allastair Reid, curable romantics. They retain
an illusion from childhood that there might be someplace into which
they can finally sink to rest: some magic land, some golden age, some
significantly other self. Yet the foreigner’s own oddness keeps him
or her separate from every encounter. Unless one regards this as
something fruitful, one cannot be considered cured.

Thank you for your patience; we may now continue. As illustration,

let us wend our way to what pass for fleshpots, those districts
which cater to the emotional needs not only of Japanese but also of
those foreigners who wander into them.
They are numerous, these pleasure quarters, warrens of reju-
venation, where the tableaux of innocence and experience are
displayed. The old Yoshiwara beyond Asakasa, the Kabuki-cho
district of Shinjuku in the west, and, further out, the new streets of
shame in Shin-Okubo.
Here, more a customer than a guest, the interested foreigner
searches for the emotional simplicity of what he might have known
as a child, if he was fortunate enough.
Here there are parlors for peepers, the nozoki-beya, where the
innocent voyeur may watch through a window controlled by a
1,000-yen bill. He peers into an almost forgotten world where
mama/big sister/auntie takes off her dress and ‘does not know she
is being looked at’.
There are large closets where you can lock the door and find a
significant other on the screen as you share your space with an open
box of kleenex and a waste-paper basket. There are other closets with
round holes at hip height where amateur enterprise takes over.
For harassed businessmen, there are somewhat more expensive
places staffed with girls in nurses’ uniforms who fasten executive
nappies, wield baby-powder puffs and urge a certain regularity of
natural functions.
There are topless and bottomless places with mirrored floors;
there are the so-called handkerchief salons where the customer is

96
persuaded to pollute his lap, where the contents are caught in a
skillfully manipulated linen square, where this square is then folded
and tucked into the breast pocket with a single word: ‘Souvenir’.
For the adventurous, there are simulated airplanes, train coaches
and buses with hired passengers of the opposite sex. For men there
are strip joints, and for women there are strip joints; for men
there are hostess clubs (women dressed as schoolgirls, as nurses,
as hostesses), for women there are host clubs (men all dressed up
or dressed in very little).
And for all those many male adults who read lascivious comic
books about schoolgirls being tied up, there are establishments
where the more wealthy will go to be tied up by women in spike
heels. And more, and more, and more.
In this sexual wonderland, the patron, native or foreign, wanders,
bemused. The variety, as in the Japanese department store, is
staggering; the choice is boggling. But what the foreigner retains
from his experience will be the sense of innocence he has newly
discovered.
In those underground theatres where girls come on, do their
dance and then invite the customer onto the stage with them, one
searches in vain for the sordid. Though the act of love more or less
inexpertly performed takes place on a revolving stage – professional
and amateur united at last – it is not squalid, shameful, soiled, dirty:
all the synonyms for ‘sordid’ that the dictionary could dredge up.
Rather, the spectacle is decorous. There is an appropriateness of
behaviour, a kind of propriety, indeed, in so far as it is possible, a
kind of formality. Many visitors have noticed this, taking it to be an
anomoly. Peter Quennell referred to Japan as a place ‘where vice
itself is ceremonial’.
Actually, it is as though one has a seat at the revival of the Age of
Gold or a season pass to Eden. Consequently, the spectacle is not
erotic, though it is palpably sexual. It is not pornographic – for porn
you need a bit of guilt, and these entertainments are as innocent
as the driven snow. Someone called it asexual kindergarten, and
so it is.

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But a kindergarten with adult attributes, one of which is the making
of money. To be sure, all societies have to an extent discovered in
the sex lives of their citizens a powerful incentive to gain, and
even left to itself sex tends towards commercialization. How much
more useful, then, if this lucrative urge can be channelled to more
effective mercantile use.
This idea occurs to all normal businessmen. Discussing Japan’s
achievements in the field does not indicate that the Japanese
phenomenon is in any way unique. Rather, as always, Japan’s way
is the common one – but more efficient, more effective and much
more visible. No-one has shown better than Japan how a natural
instinct can be turned into a well-run business.
Japan’s sex industry has been estimated as a £25-billion busi-
ness. This is very large – indeed is almost equivalent to the national
defence budget. A quarter of this enormous amount consists of the
revenue of the so-called love-hotels. All societies have commercial-
ized sex, but only a few have so marketed the venue, and none to
the extent that Japan has.
There are over 35,000 such hotels, 3,000 in Tokyo alone. The
rooms range in price from the equivalent of £60 down to half that,
for what is called in the parlance of the trade a ‘short time’. A longer
time, like all night, costs more. Here the price climbs to the height of
a certain suite for £1,250, where, to be sure, you are allowed to
occupy what is billed as a £5-million ‘rococo’ bed.
Prices differ for services offered. There are beds that rotate
or go up and down; mirror-lined rooms; two-level suites with
glass-bottomed bathtubs intended to be viewed from below; ‘space-
shuttle’ beds for simulated take-offs; and, for the ultimate in safe
sex, S/M chambers.
In addition, many hotels serve breakfast that includes a popular
item, broiled eel, still believed to be an aphrodisiac, and most rooms
contain what is called a Romance Box, which holds whiskey, soap
and a vibrator.
There is also the latest in TV electronics. Each room has a tube
with closed-circuit soft-core porn, and many have self-operated
cameras that relay one’s own hard-core performance onto the tube

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– and, it is said, into the main office as well, where a further profit
might then be made.
With such a variety of attractions, it is not surprising that love-
hotels rival Disneyland in popularity. The main reason for this is, of
course, the lack of other venues. Japanese dwellings are crowded, and
couples are correspondingly cramped. Japanese business, in taking
advantage of this sociological fact, has as usual given the customer
the latest technology. The modern love-hotel is thus different from
the older ryokan, which has been around for centuries. Tsurokomi
ryokan – which might be translated as ‘drag her (or him) inn’ – have
all been supplanted by examples on the cutting edge of the trade.
Since it has been ascertained through careful appraisal of the
market that it is women who often choose which hotel to go to, the
love-hotel’s image has been sent up-market. Indeed, the very term
love-hotel is no longer heard very much. Rather, one speaks of the
‘fashion-hotel’ or ‘leisure-hotel’, and while love-hotels had such
masculine names as ‘Empire’, ‘Metro’ and ‘Rex’, fashion-hotels have
names such as ‘Chez Nous’, ‘Inn Lively’ and the popular ‘Once
More’.
In addition, the better leisure-hotels are arranged so that from
parking the car to paying the bill, the couple is never directly
viewed. Entry is electronically controlled as is payment, privacy is
assured, and no-one at all sees the happy pair – unless, of course,
they unwisely elect to commemorate their performance on tape.
Second among money-making sexual outlets is an outstanding
example of adaptation in the world of Japanese business, the ‘adult’
bath-house, something quite different from the neighbourhood bath-
house. Though the Japanese businessman is often accused of rigidity
(not opening up markets, not assuring a level playing-field), we can
see just the opposite here: how the sex bath-house has accommo-
dated itself to changing times.
The problem originated back in 1984, when a Turkish diplomat
complained that such baths – which had become the principal
purveyor of the commodity after the passing of the apparently in-
effective 1958 anti-prostitution laws – were called Turkish. Indeed,
toruko had become the most common term of reference.

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 Always sensitive to the feelings of others, the Tokyo Special
Bath-houses Association met and determined that the 110 affiliated
bath-houses were amenable and would change their designation.
But to what? In order to determine this, a democratic method
was devised. The public, appealed to, responded with numerous
suggestions – some 2,000 postcards were received. Among the
contenders were ‘Romanburo’, ‘Colt’ (that is, ‘Koruto’, an anagram
of ‘Toruko’) and ‘Rabuyu’ (a felicitous combination of ‘love bath’
and ‘love you’). The winner, hands down, was ‘Sopurando’, or
Soapland.
Note the simplicity of the construction: a suggestion of cleanli-
ness – soap – and a proposal of pleasure – Disneyland. This con-
struction – so typical of Japanese accommodation when it is called
upon – was an instant success. Prices rose to match the level of
dignity of the new title, and more efficient money-making methods
were employed. Calling out an attendant by name now cost a bit
more; there appeared an unexplained but dignified atobarai, un-
specified charges when you checked out; and the categories of
service – special service, double service, extra special service and
full course (the latter being what we might call making love) –
were more strictly insisted upon. But there were perks as well – for
example, the new ‘fashion massage’, a service that the patron had
formerly been forced to practise upon himself.
At the same time, in addition to such main-line money-makers,
there were speciality venues. There progress varied, but there were
some examples of enterprise. Take, for example, the nozoki-beya
already mentioned. At first, there was merely the upper window;
then another appeared, also operated by a 1,000-yen note, some-
what below waist level.
These had been popular for years, voyeurism having been heavily
marketed in movies and manga alike. But the market had stabilized
itself and even shown signs of falling off. In particular, the charms
of that lower window were found to be limited.
As though in response, an innovation – from one of the enthusi-
astic workers herself – recently sprang into view. A customer put in
his customary note, and, instead of the window, the door opened.

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There, before the surprised patron, stood the girl herself. ‘But you
are supposed to be inside,’ he is quoted as having said. ‘It’s just too
much trouble,’ she said and pulled him to her.
Thus do institutions change their shapes, and voyeurism’s loss is
business’s gain. Actually, the woman pulled her patron into the
much more lucrative mainstream. It is indicative that the innovator
was female, because it has become increasingly evident that the
female market is clamouring for attention. With the largest dis-
posable income now in the handbags of unmarried women, the
Japanese sex business is being transformed from a females-for-
males service industry into an even more level playing-field.
There were earlier signs of this: the proliferating and highly
lucrative host clubs, for one. Now, however, there are – for example
– a growing number of male strip shows for women. The strippers
are, at present, all foreign, white or black, but it seems just a matter
of time before the potential for part-time work among Japanese
males is realized as well.
Not all, however, has been growth and profit, and it would not
do to paint too rosy a picture within these speciality markets. Though
the various S/M establishments in the country have shown a healthy
gain, other markets have not. Particularly disappointing has been
that sober venue so misleadingly called the ‘gay’ scene.
Here it is a matter of mercantile concern that little development
is occurring. Rising profit remains basic to the health of any drink-
ing establishment, yet most homosexual bars have, scandalously,
not raised their prices in the last five years. Drinks, unbelievably in
modern Japan, still cost a mere £3, and one is allowed, unaccount-
ably, to nurse this single drink for most of an evening. A note of
hope, however, is that lesbian bars are among the most expensive in
the city, and snacks are served whether wanted or not – a sure sign
that sane business sense is prevailing.
In general, however, the gay scene exhibits only economic
degeneracy. There are no racks of theme T-shirts, no guided tours,
no Gayland concept at all. If ever an area needed development, it is
this one.
Leaving this depressing subject, it is a pleasure to turn to the

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most innovative and successful of the recent forays into the sex
market, one that has indeed been milked of its full potential. This is
the previously mentioned video box.
Like all great business concepts, the idea is simplicity itself: a
large room in which stand a number of large boxes. The customer
enters one of them and locks the door; this activates a TV, into
which he inserts his 1,000-yen note; the soft-porn film begins; the
only other accoutrements in the box are an open box of tissues and a
waste-paper basket.
The beauty of the idea becomes apparent. Japanese business
know-how has harnessed one of nature’s most universal urges and
has persuaded the patron to pay for a pleasure hitherto wastefully
free. I cannot think of another nation that has had the vision, the
imagination to take such successful advantage of such an enormous
market.
There are, in addition, new means of marketing, offering insight
into the enterprising world of sex business in Japan. One of the
most successful means has been the vending machine. Not only do
these purvey alchohol, tobacco, soft drinks and hot lunches; they
now do their bit to satisfy an increasingly open demand for sexual
satisfaction.
There is, for example, in this age of hopefully safe sex, the lucra-
trive condom industry. Though for the up-market buyer there are
now rubber boutiques such as the extremely successful Condomania
in that heartland of the young, Harajuku, there is no doubt that the
greater number of prophylactics are sold by privacy-insuring coin-
operated machines.
Now, in a bold new step, these same machines sell porn videos.
Patrons need no longer make the sometimes embarrassing visit to
their corner shop. They can in perfect anonymity purchase porn for
as little as £12 per title. To be sure, this is soft pornography, and enter-
prising businessmen remain unable to open the market up further.
To obtain what is known as ‘the real stuff’, the corner shop must
still be visited a number of times until mutual trust between owner
and patron is built up to the point where the area under the shelf is
displayed.

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 The difficulty is that, since Japan has no censorship laws as such,
there is a problem when it comes to defining what is obscene and
what is not. For a time, a useful line was drawn at pubic hair. Any-
thing with it was obscene, anything without it was not. This led to a
number of anomolies, shaved models among them, but they at least
defined the field.
Magazines and books entering the country were routinely cleaned
of hirsute details by squads of housewives working part-time and
equipped with special equipment that scraped the areas in question
free of any image whatsoever.
Inside the country, however, it is apparent that the pubic-hair
line is not holding. Recent major magazines have breached it. There
has been some retaliation – the printer of the Japanese edition of
Madonna’s coffee-table book Sex was fined – but before long, enter-
prising Japanese publishers were following this bold lead. As always,
a healthy business sense prevailed and it became apparent that an
enormous market existed. With money to be made on all fronts, there
are now many fewer police-led crackdowns on pornography.
There are also new ways of making new productions available.
One of these is the marketing of used ‘schoolgirl’ underwear in
vending machines. The mercantile effectiveness of this is unques-
tioned: bought for as little as £1 the unit, such underwear is sold
for as much as £30. In just a month, an enterprising trio of three
men made over £90,000. Obviously, there was a public out there.
Equally, there was an abundant source. Newly rich schoolgirls
working hard to use their underwear playfully referred to their
new employment as H-baito, baito coming from arubeit, a common
loan-word for part-time work, H coming from the romanization of
hentai, which means ‘perversion’.
To be sure, there is some criticism of such sales practices. The
Education Ministry took an interest and finally decided that the
panty entrepreneurs might have broken the Antique Dealings Act.
These, then, are some examples of the highly successful commer-
cialization of a commodity in Japan – one which, despite setbacks,
has attained heights that might well render the foreign business-
man envious. Enterprise, imagination, application and sheer single-

104
mindedness have turned an instinct into a industry in Japan, have
carved an empire from an urge.

Having completed our stroll and looked into some of the results
of a child-like innocence (lack of guilt) coupled with an adult-like
experience (interest in profit), we may continue our walk along the
byways of Tokyo and begin to notice something more about what
we are seeing and about the way we are seeing it.
‘The tendency of the Japanese to view nature in its parts rather
than as a whole,’ writes Hasegawa Nyosekan, ‘is fully apparent in
the arrangement of Japanese cities.’ They have, he says, no atmo-
sphere; they show few cultural characteristics; wherever one goes,
the confusion of the newly built-up rules: ‘The result is as though a
box of toys has been upset – the product of the individual whims
of a lot of feebly Western-style architects.’ The Ginza, for example,
spills its toys most extravagantly. Each building stands isolated, its
eyes closed to its surroundings. These are merely lined up as at an
exhibition, proud in their individuality, without a care for where
they are: ‘No overall atmosphere can emerge and chaos reigns.’
Japan has, indeed, long cultivated a kind of partial vision, and
this is seen particularly in the sights of Tokyo. One is advised to
admire the famous old shrine and, since one is not Japanese, one
also includes the gas station next door, the TV aerial in back and the
supermarket truck in front, and is consequently disturbed.
It is doubtful that a native sees all of this, because he or she is
gifted with partial vision, the ability to ignore that which would
encroach upon the famous shrine, the single ancient pine or the
once wide vista of the sea. The West does not encourage vision this
selective, but in Tokyo it is almost a necessity.
In a place this crowded, there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ view.
Consequently, impurities must become invisible. One sees this
principle at work in many other areas. At the better hot-spring onsen
hotels, for example, you are literally invisible to the help until you
are washed and dressed and desire to be seen. It is then and only
then that you are addressed. Carparks, acres of bikes, oil refineries,
strip-mining are ignored in the same way.

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 When one looks at the view, one looks at it and only it. This is a
way of viewing for which the camera is famous. It can edit out what
it does not want. One can frame or zoom, and the undesirable is
gone as though it never existed. Since they share this gift, most
Japanese are notoriously fond of the camera. As they ought to be –
cameras approximate their own learned vision.
This vision is presentational. It makes a selection among avail-
abilities and proffers it. In this sense all views are partial, and indeed
there are few full-scale, in-your-face frontal views of anything. Except
for several shrines and temples, a couple of banks or company head-
quarters, there is no feeling of frontality at all.
This is a contrast to the West, where frontality is itself a kind of
presentation. Buildings are designed to be viewed full on, and this
primary stance is deemed important. Everything is shown. But this
means a viewing space – a square or plaza in front of the edifice,
often two or three times as wide as the viewed object is high. This is
impossible in crowded Japan.
The intentions attributed to the viewed object must take another
form. One of the reasons that the Sukiyabashi police inhabit a ginger-
bread house is that the display is intended to stress the benign quality
of the national police force.

Most countries experience some kind of presentational imperative:

each country has its own political ends, its own ritualistic needs
and, consequently, its own near-theatrical codifications. In any com-
parison among these, I feel that Japan would rank high, that as a
culture it experiences a strong need for ritual and hence exhibits
a wide range of near-theatrical manifestations.
Among the various origin myths, I think only the Japanese one
offers a paradigm for theatre. The circumstances are related in that
ancient ‘history’ the Kojiki. In a fit of pique, Amaterasu Omikami
retired to her cave. Since she was the Great Divinity Illuminating
Heaven (a translation of her name), she left the world in darkness.
She was lured out again by the merrymaking – dances and the like –
feigned by other deiities. Curious, she peered out from her shelter
(the first nozoki-beya) and was drawn forth to illuminate her world

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once again. It was a presentation, a performance, that was the salva-
tion of the land. The theatrical paradigm was in place from the very
first.
Japan is certainly not alone in creating such myths as this, but
it is, I think, very nearly the only culture to so plainly label its solar
myth as a performance. The goddess is fooled, the merrymaking is
feigned – it is all false – and this is approved.
While it is not unusual for the legends of other cultures to
include some kind of performance (Judas kissing Jesus is a dumb-
show for the centurions), it is highly unusual that this be approved
– given the blessing, as it were, of both Shinto church and Yamato
state. I think it can be said that Japan early on expressed a theatrical
urge and has continued to manifest this in much of its culture.
A familiar example is traditional Japanese architecture. Though
much influenced by that of Korea and China, this way of making a
building is – as many have noted – rather like making a stage. The
reference is to the traditional Japanese house, which many earlier
observers saw as a performing area. It was raised off the ground,
like a stage, it had no fourth wall (indeed, it had no walls at all), and
its interior divisions could, like stage sets, be moved about at will.
Admittedly, one cannot make too much of this because such
structures share a good deal with domestic architecture elsewhere,
but inside this theatrical house is a smaller theatre that might be
unique to Japan.
This is the tokonoma, an alcove in the main room of the traditional
house that serves as a place of presentation – nowadays mainly of a
flower arrangement or a scroll, or both in some kind of artful juxta-
position.
To be sure, here too there are Eastern antecedents, and the West
has something similar in its furniture of display, the what-not, the
china closet and so on. In Japan, however, the theatrical analogy is
much stronger. Not only are there featured players – the scroll, the
flower arrangment, sometimes the valuable vase as well – but there
are frequent changes of bill as the seasons pass.
The tokonoma as stage has thus built into it the spatial and
temporal considerations that limit and define the theatre itself. It

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might thus be used as an indication of a presentational urge in
Japan.
Another indication might be the way in which domestic nature
is presented. The Japanese garden is well known, indeed nearly
notorious, for being a contrived spectacle. This stone is moved over
a metre, and that bamboo stand is moved back two. The pebbles or
sand are brought in at great expense, and the view of the distant
mountain is purloined and called borrowed scenery. This is the
‘natural garden’.
One might argue that European and Middle Eastern gardens
are even more constructed, with their balanced symmetry and geo-
metrical intentions. And so they are, but the inventors and admirers
of these gardens never called them natural, which is just what the
Japanese assume theirs to be.
Nature has been presented. Tidied up, stylized, it has been made
– as the old garden manuals have it – to express nature better than
nature itself does. It is presumed that the integrity of any original
does not exist. As in any dramatic presentation, the only integrity is
that of performance.
Not only does nature in the form of the Japanese garden become
spectacle – as in, for example, the garden at Ryoan-ji – it also becomes
the theatrical experience itself – as in the Edo garden, where as you
stroll about vistas are disclosed, scenes hidden and then revealed in
a manner most reminiscent of the stage.
Even more theatrical is the art of ikebana. Here the stage is
prepared (the tokohoma or its modern equivalent), the presentation
has rules (never mind that these ‘living flowers’ are now dead), and
– as in naturalist theatre – the aim is to make the real more real than
reality itself.
Or, to put it in the best possible light, as Count Herman Keyserling
observed:

As to Japan, the understanding of nature of its inhabitants is so

inordinately great that they have subjugated their surroundings
aesthetically; in the same way as a patch of color can determine
and change the meaning of a picture, the Japanese by deliberately

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 inserting his particular existence into surrounding nature has
transferred the keynote of the latter completely into himself.

Let us continue our stroll through the city. Descending from the
modest citadel of the old castle, we proceed through the circular
byways down to the mercantile maze. We will continue on to the
Low City, then off to the High City and out to the suburbs, onto
the plain of Musashi on which Tokyo lies. Let us also consider what
we are doing.
One walks for various reasons. Often it is merely to get some-
where. The street is seen as a stretch connecting one place with
another. Sometimes, however, it is seen as itself. One is going no
place in particular. We look at the street and not the destination.
This makes walking in Marrakesh different from walking in, say,
Chicago. And walking in Tokyo is different from either. Streets here
have their ostensible and mundane uses, but they also have some-
thing more. They are areas of display, and you are the audience.
There is so much to look at.
This makes us a spectator. One is, in Walter Benjamin’s felicitous
phrase, ‘botanizing on the asphalt’. Strolling slowly, looking simply
for the pleasure of it, one becomes what Baudelaire called a flâneur,
an observer who has no reason for observing except the pleasure of
observation. Benjamin further observed that this gaze of Baudelaire’s
flâneur ‘bestows a conciliatory gleam over the growing destitution of
men in the great city’.
Which is how he explained one’s becoming an homme des foules,
a man of the crowds. But one can view the crowded street without
becoming too concerned about destitution. It is possible to look
without making moral judgements of this sort. Particularly if the
city is – unlike, say, nineteenth-century Paris – safe.
Baudelaire may well have asked ‘. . .what are the dangers of the
forest and prairie compared with the daily shocks and conflicts of
civlization,’ but we could not ask this of Tokyo. One may have
observed, as did J. M. Richards (quoted by Mark Girouard), that the
Japanese, ‘having totally tamed their countryside, deliberately kept
their jungle in the cities’, but this does not explain the inordinate

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safety. Any woman (any man as well) may walk anywhere at any
hour in perfect safety.
Yet, with the difference of being safe, certain sections of Tokyo do
indeed still somehow contain signs of the past. Girouard has said
that Tokyo is sometimes still like Paris a century ago: ‘If one wants
to get any feeling of what Montmartre was like in the 1890s, one is
more likely to do so in Asakusa or the Yoshiwara than in the sleazy
streets of Montmartre today.’

All cities have their Shitamachi, an old downtown, a section earlier,

older, a place where one may find what remains of history. New
York has its below-Canal-Street, London has its East End. Neither
of these cities, however, makes as much of its downtown as does
Tokyo. To the Japanese, particularly the native Tokyoite, the capital
used to be divided. There was the Low City and then there was
the rest.
The rest, the High City, the Yamanote, is by far the larger part of
Tokyo, but it is taken for granted. The Shitamachi was made much
of, spoken of as something special, its people unique. Someone
born in New York’s Fulton Street or along London’s South Bank
was just another city dweller, but someone born in the Low City
was something else.
He was (if the product of three generations in that locality) a real
Edokko, a child of Edo. He embodied and displayed a number of
distinctive qualities and thought of himself as being open, generous,
hot-tempered, quick-witted, inquisitive, generous, quick to offense
and quick to forgive. He found himself spontaneous and impulsive,
traits one does not associate with modern Japanese.
So different did he find himself from other Tokyoites – and natu-
rally from those in other cities, especially those money-mongers in
Osaka – that he coined a number of wise sayings, one of the most
striking of which was: ‘Always spend the money you make in the
same day.’
If the Edokko resembled another downtowner, it was not the
Cockney (a parallel often stressed), but the sponanteous and im-
pulsive Elizabethan. Indeed, there may have been a time when all

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Japanese were like this – before the beginning of the Tokugawa
reign. One would like to think so, because even now there are places
which have managed to escape the full weight of this repressive
government and consequently share something of an Elizabethan
quality: the people of Kagoshima, of Kochi, of Choshi, resemble
those of Edo’s Low City.
The reason the people of old Asakusa, the riverside part of
Shitamachi, escaped was not distance, as in the cases of Kyushu’s
Kagoshima and Shikoku’s Kochi, but the peculiarity of their territory
and its history.
Originally, Asakusa and beyond were a plain of flowering
grasses – hence the name. The Lady Nijo visited the temple there in
1289: ‘To get there I had to pass through vast fields so densely covered
with bush clover, reed, and pampas grass that no other plants were
able to grow in them. The height of the grasses was such that a man
on horseback could pass through unseen.’
Despite its beauty, however, the place enjoyed a singularly bad
reputation. An ogre lived in her cottage on the moor, goes one
story, and travellers disappeared with noticeable regularity. It was
not only dangerous, it was the ends of the earth. In the Noh play
Sumidagawa, the distraught mother seeks her missing child all the
way to Mukojima (‘the island over there’), an area now just across
the bridge from the Asakusa branch of the Matsuzakaya Depart-
ment Store. Also – an important consideration – the land lay to the
north-east of the castle, a direction considered by geomancers to be
the least fortunate. Consequently, the area was neglected.
One further consideration is that although the Sumida River
ran through the Low City, it was never to Tokyo as the Arno was to
Florence or the Seine to Paris. The city did not grow around the
river; indeed, the castle was some distance from it. Edo was a city
created by fiat and by rulers, not by nature and by common folk
trying to make a living and seeking cheap water transportation.
For all these reasons, the land on which the Low City stood was
not highly valued. It was turned over to the merchants, the purveyors,
the poorer townspeople and the priests.
There were a number of the latter, and their many temples

113
served to keep the dreaded north-eastern influence from the castle
and its tenants. The main Asakusa temple was ancient (tracing its
beginnings back to the seventh century), and a new building, the
Kinryu-san (Temple of the Golden Dragon), was completed in the
middle of the seventeenth century by Iemitsu, Ieyasu’s successor.
In 1682, however (on 18 March say the temple records), some fisher-
men found in their nets a small statue of the Buddhist diety Kannon
– the so-called Goddess of Mercy.
Such a miraculous find so near a large and prosperous temple
resulted in a popular name for the place. The temple began to be
called Kannon-sama, and, though its official name has been changed
several times (it is now Senso-ji), it still is. The building was destroyed
(along with the entire area) in the Second World War, but the post-
war concrete edifice remembers the original dragon in a large ceiling
mural, and the faithful still come to pray to Kannon-sama.
Come in their thousands, even now, which is the reason that
an entire city originally grew up around the temple, one that was
encouraged by the government since it could banish there those
entertainments thought disruptive in Edo proper. So it was to
Asakusa that restaurants, drinking stalls, entertainment parlours,
theatres and the licensed quarter went.
The latter area, north of present-day Asakusa, was the famous
Yoshiwara, one of the most celebrated red-light districts of Asia.
Flourishing until the anti-prostitution law of 1958 was passed, it
consisted of house upon house, woman upon woman – some-
thing for everyone and someone for everything. Before the Second
World War, it still had great painted palaces, like those seen under
the sea by Urashimataro, illuminated picture-windows filled with
women. Until the turn of the century, it had hosted the great
procession of courtesans. The oiran, teetering on high-toothed
sandals, one white hand resting lightly on the shoulder of the
servant shielding her with an enormous bamboo umbrella, her
white face a mask, her kimono alive with colour, proceeded slowly
through the open street, a rare being escaped as if from some celestial
aviary.
Edo Castle had regulated human appetite to a geographical

114
position, and there, for a time, it left it. Though there were many
investigations and reforms, Asakusa and its environs were not
usually subject to the repressions inflicted upon the rest of the city.
Among the reasons for this were the facts that such a pressure-valve
was necessary and that increasingly the financial affairs of the
city were falling into the hands of merchants, themselves fond of
such ostentatious pleasures as the latest fashions, the world of the
Kabuki, and the fabulous licensed quarter.
It was they who fed the great pleasure machines of Yoshiwara/
Asakusa which we now know from the prints and pictures, novels
and plays that the place produced. Saikaku’s loving ladies review
lives of amorous adventure; the grand courtesan Yatsuhashi walks
the boards; Sukeroku (samurai in disguise) comes up from the
provinces and sees life lived as it ought to be. The actors and
wrestlers of Sharaku, the courtesans of Utamaro look at us out of
woodcut prints and show us what it was like back then.
To view the moon from a brothel veranda, surrounded by cour-
tesans who knew their classics: this was the world of the ukiyo, the
floating world of transient pleasure – the maple leaf exceptional
only in the deepening hue that showed its nearing end, the cherry
blossom meaningful only as it fell.
One pursued one’s lesser ends – making love, making money.
One did not fight with life; one drifted elegantly with its current,
living for the moment, carried along by one cared not what, like
(a description by an ukiyo poet) ‘a gourd floating downstream’.
This at least was the ideal, one much at odds with the stern
Confucian castle. In Yoshiwara, one celebrated each new fashion
(an odd colour worn by an actor, a singular way of tying one’s
sash) and cultivated an attitude known as iki, which combined
what we would now call being ‘with it’ and an assumed insou-
ciance that refused to assign any importance to the very qualities
being celebrated. Within the castle, one did nothing of the sort.
The elegant diversions of Yoshiwara were reflected in the more
plebian pleasures of Asakusa itself, the vast grounds around the
Kannon Temple. But this pleasure ground did not really develop
its own identity until the collapse of the Tokugawa regime, the

115
removal of the Emperor to Edo, and the designation of Tokyo as
capital of Japan.
The great Kannon Temple brought in the crowds, but it was the
great pleasure city, Asakusa, that entertained them. Even foreigners
knew this. A. B. Mitford listed some of the attractions in the mid-
nineteenth-century, including wild beasts and performing monkeys,
automata, conjurers, acrobats and jesters. The 1891 Chamberlain/
Mason guidebook, as reported by Seidensticker, found that

the grounds of Asakusa are the quaintest and liveliest place in

Tokyo . . . performing monkeys, cheap photographers, street
artists, jugglers, wrestlers, life-sized figures in clay, vendors of
toys and lollipops of every sort, and, circulating amidst all these
cheap attractions, a seething crowd of busy holiday-makers.

There were other kinds of liveliness as well. An early foreign

observer, W. E. Griffes, noted that near the temple were ranged the
archery galleries,

presided over by pretty black-eyed Dianas, in paint, powder and

shining coiffures. They bring you tea, smile, talk nonsense, and
giggle . . . and then ask you leading and very personal questions
without blushing . . . Full grown able-bodied men can find
amusement for hours at such play.

And later on, in back of the stalls as well, for these black-eyed Dianas
were in it for the money.
With its attractions of sensationalism and sexuality, Asakusa pros-
pered. One of Tanizaki’s characters – protagonist of a story, ‘The
Secret’, translated by Anthony Chambers – indicated the protean
joys of the Asakusa of 1911:

Changing my costume every night so as not to be noticed, I

plunged into the crowd in Asakusa Park . . . I enjoyed using a
false beard, a mole, or a birthmark to alter my features. But one
night, at a second-hand clothing shop . . . I saw a woman’s lined
kimono with a delicate check pattern against a blue ground, and
was seized with a desire to try it on.

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Later, in an unfinished novel, The Mermaid, Tanizaki tells what
Asakusa was like in 1918. Its attractions were (in Ken Ito’s translation)

plays of the old style, operettas, plays in the new style, comedies,
movies – movies from the West and Japanese productions,
Douglas Fairbanks and Onoe Matsunosuke – acrobats balancing
on balls, bareback riders, naniwa bushi singers, girl gidayu chanters,
the merry-go-round, the Hanayashiki Amusement Park, the
Twelve-Storey Tower, shooting galleries, whores, Japanese restau-
rants, Chinese restaurants and Western restaurants – the Rairaiken,
won ton, chow mein, oysters over rice, horsemeat, snapping turtles,
eels, and the Cafe Paulista.

There was also the Asakusa Opera, where opera was actually sung
in the beginning. One early attraction was Rigoletto, and ‘La donna
é mobile’ became a local hit although, no tenor being available, the
Duke was sung by a soprano. Shortly thereafter, however, the
attractions became more varied. Here Tanizaki’s hero discovered

caricatures of Charlie Chaplin, and living reproductions of such

stars as Pearl White, Ruth Roland, Doris Kenyon, Billie Burke,
and Dustin Farnum. The reproductions were, of course, crude
knock-offs . . . but they charmed the audience precisely because
they were crude.

The Asakusa Opera also meant flesh on view, the firm thighs of the
chorus line. In a story published in 1946, ‘The Decoration’, Kafu
remembers (in Seidensticker’s translation) what it was like:

Backstage was given over to clutter, such a clutter that you

wondered how anything more could possibly be added. An
indescribable disorder . . . what first caught the eye, however,
was not the violent jumble of colors, or even the faces of the girls
as they sprawled about on the floor and then sat up again. It
was the powerful flesh of the arms and legs . . . it called to mind
the earthen hallway of a florist’s shop, where a litter of torn-off
petals and withering leaves is left unswept and trampled into
shapelessness.

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Crudity became an Asakusa commodity. The hero of Tanizaki’s
unfinished novel is both put off and attracted by it. He confides that
he is drawn to Asakusa because, finding Tokyo ugly, he wants to
experience this ugliness in its purest state. He suggests that ‘. . . since
seeking beauty in this city of Tokyo is useless, can it not be said that
the most agreeable place to live is Asakusa, where ugliness bares its
essential form?’
This crude and ugly but vibrant and sexy Asakusa was shortly
destroyed. The 1923 Kanto Earthquake demolished it, as it demol-
ished much of Tokyo and Yokohama. Among the more famed
disasters was the collapse of the Asakusa Twelve-Storey Tower (the
Ryounkaku, or Cloud-Surpassing Pavilion), a brick structure that
had become synonymous with the area. Also gone was the old
neighbourhood structure of the place. That sense of community,
raffish but real, which had appealed to so many.
As a pleasure city, an entertainment capital, one of the great
night towns of the world, however, reconstruction began at once.
And now, symbolizing the new Asakusa, there was the Subway
Tower Building, with its observation platform. Kawabata Yasunari
said of it that it was in the Osaka style, all the floors except the top
one being eating places. This influence of the mercantile Kansai on
what was left of old Edo was commonly lamented. ‘Why, it’s gotten
just like Osaka’ commented a character in one Kawabata story.
Actually, it was like no place else on earth. In commenting on
Kawabata’s later novel, The Crimson Band of Asakusa, in 1939, Kataoka
Yoshikaza described the new Asakusa as that ‘human market’ where
‘everything conceivable is flung out in its raw state’ and ‘all human
desires are given full rein.’ In the new Asakusa,

the pleasure resort of the Edo period, the vestiges of the crude,
semi-enlightened curiosity of the Meiji era, and the over-
ripeness of the present era of capitalist corruption are thrown
together in a forever disordered state. Or organized in a manner
peculiarly like the place itself. Eroticism and frivolity and speed
and comic-strip humor; the bare legs of dancing girls and jazzy
reviews; kiss-dances, foreign girls, ground-cherries and popular

118
 songs; the movie, the circus, the fake, dilapidated aquarium and
insectarium. Here the girls bob their hair and ‘bobbed-hair’ so-
and-so, wearing a red dress, plays the piano, deep in a narrow
backstreet lane, with her knees exposed. Her rendezvous notes
are scribbled on the back of the Goddess Kannon’s written
oracles . . .

Like Montmartre in the 1890s, like New York’s Times Square in the
1940s, the place was license itself. Soeta Azembo (again in Seiden-
sticker’s translation) described it in heightened terms: ‘Asakusa of
the myriads flings everything forth in the raw. All manner of desire
dances there naked. All classes and all races mix into one great flow,
limitless, bottomless, not distinguishing day from night. Asakusa
is alive.’
Among all these varied attractions, one of the most popular was
the cinema, a form of entertainment early associated with Asakusa
since the first Tokyo movie house, the Denkikan, had opened there
in 1903. Here one could see the wonders of the West; after 1932, one
could even hear Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper talk to each
other in Morocco.
In his 1937 A Strange Tale from East of the River, Nagai Kafu wrote
that (as translated by Seidensticker)

young and old delight in moving pictures and make them the
subject of daily conversation, and even a person like me some-
times feels inclined to wonder what the conversation might be
about. I always make it a special point, therefore, to look at bill-
boards when I pass moving-picture houses. One can tell by the
billboards, without seeing the pictures themselves, what the
general plots are, and what delights people so.

By 1930, Kawabata noted, Asakusa had fourteen movie houses. He

also stated that it had even more legitimate theatres. In addition, his
survey continues, there were half a dozen vaudeville (yose) halls
and one Kabuki theatre, as well as the largest number of pawn-
shops in the city, and also the most beggars: in the summer of that
year, some 800 were said to be living in Asakusa Park, though the

119
author did not trust this official estimate and maintained that there
were far more.
It was the stage that Kawabata preferred, in particular the
Asakusa Review, which opened in 1929 at the Kasino Fori (Casino
Folies). He described the review as comprised of ‘eroticism and
nonsense and speed, and humor in the vein of the topical cartoon,
the jazz song, legs’. Eroguro was the spirit of the age. This combina-
tion of the first syllables of erotic and grotesque typified that combi-
nation of the sexy and the absurd. There were, on the one hand, the
firm-thighed chorines and, on the other (since Meiji times, it was
said), the lady who smoked through her navel.
Kawabata made the Folies famous in his novel, though their
leading comedian, Enoken, claimed that their popularity was merely
based on the false rumour that on Fridays the chorus girls dropped
their panties. The novelist also gave us our only real record of what
the place was like. The Crimson Band of Asakusa showed it at its most
Asakusa-like: hedonistic, grasping, frivolous, frenetic and filled
with flesh.
Kawabata described Asakusa in its pre-war prime. Soon the
place began its decline. Exotic bloom that it was in increasingly
illiberal Japan, it began to fade. By 1938, the novelist Takami Jun
(translated here by Seidensticker), wrote that

the famous old places of Asakusa had been abandoned . . . the

birthplace of the Asakusa review was in advanced neglect, the
subject of weird stories. Late at night, it was said, you could hear
the sound of tap dancing on the roof. It has since been torn down
and so those who loved the Casino Folies have lost all trace of
their dream.

Yet Asakusa continued on with remarkable vitality and to the end

managed to retain something of its earlier charm. Jun wrote in
1939 that Asakusa still had a ‘peculiar kind of warmth’. It was like ‘a
jazz record blaring forth in an alien tongue’, but ‘. . . it becomes all
shyness and awkwardness like a girl with an old-fashioned coiffeur
and an advanced bathing suit.’
In a city that saw its pleasures and freedoms curtailed as Japan

120
left behind the liberties of the ‘20s and ‘30s and marched towards
the wartime austerities of the ‘40s, Asakusa remained to indicate
that there was more to life than serving one’s country. It might have
been mercantile, but it was also acceptingly human. Kawabata
noted in The Crimson Band of Asakusa that a popular song of the
day got it right: ‘Asakusa, the pulse of Tokyo/Asakusa markets
humanity.’
The military takeover of the ‘40s subdued the Asakusa spirit
even more, however. Seidensticker shows us Nagai Kafu one cold
night in 1944 recording the closing of the Opera House, his favourite
venue: ‘As I passed the lane of shops . . . on my way to the subway, I
found myself weeping again . . . I have been witness to it all, Tokyo
going to ruins.’
It went completely to ruins in 1945. In the American incendiary
raids of 9 and 10 March, between 70,000 and 80,000 people were
killed and some two-fifths of the city were destroyed – including
Asakusa. The Kannon Temple was hit at 1:30 a.m. and was consumed
in two hours.
After the conclusion of the Pacific War, the Allied Occupation
authorities gave much of the land to the Kannon Temple which,
having no money, sold it. Thus Asakusa Park with its famous pond
disappeared. The area behind the temple was turned into a parking
lot for tourist buses; another portion went to a motion-picture
company, which built a theatre and an amusement hall.
That post-war innovation, the strip show, became visible from
1948 – more flesh than ever before seen, with variations as well:
the bath strip, the tightrope strip, etc. But all this activity was
illusory. Tokyo was moving West, Shinjuku was the new night town,
and Asakusa was forgotten. By 1966, one newspaper headlined:
‘Deserted Place: Thy Name is Asakusa’.
Since Asakusa was no longer alive, it could be taxidermized –
that is, gentrified. Land prices being what they are, it was seen
as a smart business move to make a kind of Asakusa-land out
of Asakusa. Cheaply made, jerry-built, hopefully post-modern
structures were called Denkikan and Rokko after genuine Asakusa
landmarks.

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 But the crowds were gone. The only people who go regularly to
Asakusa now are those who go to play the horses at the enormous
Racing Centre and those who are too poor to go elsewhere. When
night falls, there is no-one there. The hopefully posh restaurants
have closed for good, most of the major theatres are no longer
standing, and Asakusa is much like any other depressed neigh-
bourhood. The ogre is long dead, the house on the moor long razed,
the traveller goes unafraid, but the flowering grasses have vanished.
And yet . . . Tokyo always, if only for a day, remembers:

May 21,1978. To the Sanja Matsuri in Asakusa, that annual spring

festival which for a day returns Tokyo its rural ancestry. Bands of
men (and nowadays women) carry the mighty omikoshi float on
their shoulders, bouncing the happy god aloft in his portable
shrine, wearing festival clothes from earlier times, pressed
against each other, shoulders and cheeks against the wood and
the gilt, feet moving together as though each had become part of
a centipede, lurching together, chanting, shouting, each caught,
finally, gratefully, in the grip of something larger.
And for every person participating, one thousand who had
come to see. By two in the afternoon the press was such that one
could not move. Nakama doshi – just us together – in every street,
all held in the sway of the god in darkness, swaying in his shrine.
An exciting, exhausting sight.
I gaze at the tattooed men – floats with the fully tattooed
standing aloft, swaying; decorated men naked but for a fundoshi
loincloth, straining and heaving under the shrine; older men
with belts and kimonos open, just a glimpse of rare old tattooing,
leading the holy procession through the streets. A small, hand-
some, middle-aged man, strong legs, a slight paunch, cloth-strip
around loins, cloth strip around head. Up the left arm swims a
carp, down the right arm glides a carp, just that, and a scattering
of cherry blossoms. Perspiring tattoos – Kannon as though weep-
ing, Kintaro as though sweaty with exertions, Fudo glistening in
his painted fire as though covered with fresh blood.
Foreigners are always encouraged at this matsuri. Japanese

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 are here so fully enmeshed with each other that they can drop
the national xenophobia. They become Elizabethan again, filled
with gusto and cheer. I always feel like an early emissary –
perhaps fifteenth century, probably Portuguese. It is all very
friendly as well. At the Sanya Festival is the only time I have ever
been touched, handled by the Japanese – by unknown Japanese,
at any rate. A comradely hand, a glimpse of history – more, a
view of the Japanese as they might have been before the
Tokugawa cookie-cutter descended. A haze of fellow-feeling
and good-cheer. Up to a point. Promising conversations are
always cut short by the magic call of the shrine and its god and
all those waiting compatriots.

Ueno, a twenty-minute walk (now a five-minute subway ride) from

Asakusa, is also Low City, but it is quite different. Even the temple
bells of the two places are traditionally separate. In an old haiku,
such a bell is heard and the poet asks: Ueno? Asakusa?
But the poet knows. The places are really not at all alike. The nov-
elist Saito Ryoku (as quoted by Edward Seidensticker) wrote: ‘Ueno
is for the eyes, a park with a view; Asakusa is for the mouth,
a park for eating and drinking . . . Ueno is silent, mute; Asakusa
chatters on and on.’
One of the reasons for Ueno’s relative dignity was the proximity
of the rulers. Many were buried there eventually (one can still
visit the tombs of the shoguns near Uguisudani Station), and the
rest kept paying visits. Among the other reasons was the mighty
Kanei-ji temple compound, built under Hidetata, the second
shogun, in 1625.
It was one of the sights of Edo, an enormous collection of build-
ings placed in the geomantically correct north-east position. One
was called the Toeizan Temple in graceful reference to the temples
atop Kyoto’s Hieizan. It was decorated by Jingoro, the woodworker
who did the famous sleeping cat at the Nikko Tokugawa mauso-
leum. In just twenty days, he completed two great pillars, both
holding dragons, one ascending, one descending. No sooner were
they finished than the priests found them dripping wet early one

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morning. They were so life-like that they had been bathing at the
large pond beneath the temple.
This manufactured legend gives an indication of Ueno’s original
character. In a city with little history, legend could provide explana-
tions. Also, historical structures could be approximated. One such
(unlike the original Kanei-ji) is still standing. This is the smaller
copy of the Kyoto Kiyomizu-dera, which is here called the Kiyomizu
Kannon-do and which overlooks the Shinobazu Pond.
Below, in the middle of the pond, is the home of another female
deity. This is the Benten-do, a post-war copy of the original octago-
nal building dedicated to a rather florid goddess, perhaps Hindu
and one of the seven quasi-Shinto deities who made their way to
the shores of Japan. No goddess of mercy, Benten is musical (she
plays the lute) and much given to lubricity. Next to her templed
island is a small rocky islet where, fittingly, sits one of the last
phallic stones from old Edo. From the front, the image is a priest
with a cowl over his head. From the back, it isn’t.
Above the pond, past the torii and up the steps is one of the
few Edo-period structures left, the Toshogu Shrine, now somewhat
neglected but still speaking of the past. It is here that Jingoro’s
dragons are now to be found. All the rest of the mighty complex
went up in flames during the battles of 1868. Here the last of the
Tokugawa loyalists engaged the imperial forces and were routed,
but not before setting fire to magnificent Kanei-ji.
There are several temple gates that still show their bullet holes.
Standing in the plaza at the entrance to what is now Ueno Park is
a statue of one of the heroes of the fracas, Saigo Takamori, himself a
rebel against the government he had fought to install. Because of
the circumstances of his death (ritual suicide), he is not dressed in
full uniform as bronze statues usually are. Instead, he wears a
simple, short robe, and the casual nature of his attire is emphasized
by the dog on a leash which accompanies him. His widow, upon
seeing this statue, is said to have exclaimed: ‘But he never dressed
like that!’
Just ten years after the battle, things had so changed that Mr and
Mrs Ulysses S. Grant could walk about the park that the place had

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become, plant a few trees (still standing), and perch on the little
porch of the Kiyomizu-do and admire the view. And 50 years later,
things had changed so much more that Nagai Kafu, wandering
through Ueno, could look about him and observe that even though
the city more and more resembled some English-American colony,
still, if one could imagine chancing upon some corner where a
shade of past glory remained, this corner would be at Ueno, among
these abandoned tombs.
Something of the official (as contrasted to Asakusa’s unofficial)
remains in Ueno: most of Tokyo’s museums are located there, as
well as a number of libraries, several concert-hall complexes and
the zoo. The park, Tokyo’s largest, aerates the city much as Central
Park aerates New York. Though not so heavily wooded, Ueno
contains more trees than any place else in the city except for the
forest still standing around the Meiji Shrine right in the middle of
the High City itself. Everything is well maintained, filled with
decent city strollers. Though the place is also a commercial centre
(which Asakusa no longer is) and has its raffish side, it remains
respectable. Originally pretentious and official, it has now become
civic. Though a part of the Low City, it is already looking towards
the High.

A 45-minute walk (some eleven minutes by subway) leaves the Low

City behind with the New approaching as one reaches the Ginza –
not only that wide avenue we have been walking along since Ueno
but also the blocks of streets on either side. There are over 50 of
these within the eight blocks east of the avenue, and an almost
equal number to the west.
The Ginza proper, the avenue, is only eight blocks long, from
Kyobashi to Shimbashi; bridges at either end once marked these
termini. The street continues, to be sure, but its name changes. From
Kyobashi up to Ueno, it is called Chuo-dori.
It is also one of the earlier straight streets, a planned thorough-
fare. Though the area was originally a nondescript strip of land
crowded between daimyo residences and the homes of the Tsukiji
townspeople, the particularly disastrous fire in 1872 (3,000 houses

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destroyed though only three people killed) provided the opportu-
nity for a rare bit of city planning.
At the same time, it was felt that Tokyo needed an up-to-date
neighbourhood, a place where the New, which was flooding the
country, could be properly viewed by both natives and visitors. The
fire-break that was the Ginza was transformed into an imitation
Western town, with two-storey brick houses, the first sidewalks
and gaslights.
Though nothing remains of this strange creation, it lent the Ginza
its reputation as the home of the new, the residence of fashion, a
reputation it maintained for many years. By the 1930s, the Ginza
had become self-consciously stylish. It was written about as ‘the
outdoor Peacock Alley’ and ‘the Mecca of Tokyo night life’. One
social critic wrote that ‘. . . to be children of the Ginza is to be truly
modern.’
The children were the moga and the mobo – portmanteau terms
for ‘modern girl’ and ‘modern boy’, the former with spit-curl and
cloche, the latter with plus-fours and cap. Here too came all those
others to whom a stroll on the Ginza was an hour in the modern
world.
This occupation, strolling on the Ginza, was described by a term
one still hears: ginbura, the first syllable coming from Ginza, the
latter two from the word for sauntering. The street became one of
Tokyo’s first (and last) promenades. By 8:00 in the evening, wrote
one commentator, ‘. . . the ginbura is in full swing . . . even well-
known actors and actresses are seen shopping and promenading
along the street.’
Well-known foreigners as well. Charlie Chaplin and Paulette
Goddard (and her chaperone mother) were to be seen, as well as Jean
Cocteau (with Marcel Khill), who later wrote that ‘. . . la contraste
entre les buildings and leurs kimono est si vif qu’on est tenté de me
mettre leurs mines et leurs fourrires sous des ombrelles plates . . .’
One took refreshments at the Columbin, a pâtisserie française
which had a ceiling painted by Leonard Fujita; one bought paper
and incense at the Kyukyodo (still there) and cakes at Kimuriya
(also still there) and the fashionable new wristwatches at the

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Hattori Building (now Wako), the corner building with the clock
on top which remains the symbol of the Ginza. There was also the
famous Café Plantan, which survived until the 1945 air-raids; it was
there that the term ginbura was apparently coined and Tanizaki
famously said that to use such a term was sure proof that one came
from the provinces. Originally, said Matsuyama Shozo, the painter
who ran the Plantan, the word referred only to those idlers and
good-for-nothings who hung around the Ginza. These early flâneurs,
however, were soon supplanted by more respectable individuals
who came to stroll and shop.
Shopping became a major industry along the Ginza. The big
department stories (Mitsukoshi, Matsuya, Shirokiya, Takashimaya,
Matsuzakaya) all established themselves along its length. In addi-
tion, there were a number of speciality shops, including that of
Mikimoto, the ‘Pearl King’. This emphasis on money was fitting
because the land upon which the Ginza was built had been the
district (za) where silver (gin) had been minted.
Money was spent in other ways as well. The waitresses in the
cafés of the Ginza became notorious. Nagai Kafu, an expert in
such matters, said that they were like the unlicensed prostitutes
so abundant in Western cities. They were called suito garu (sweet
girls) – both they and the garu boi (boi meant ‘waiter’) became one of
the attractions of the Ginza cafés.
One anonymous account, written in English and intended for
foreign eyes, described a Ginza rendezvous:

Most of the visitors take beer and sake; whiskey and cognac are
the liquors for young swells, and those mixed with soda water
are often welcomed . . . At one corner you find a young lady and
an old gentleman sitting by a small round table between them.
The lady is in her Japanese dress a la mode and the man is in
European clothes. On the table is an emptied bottle of soda water
and a cup full of coffee stands before the lady, and the man, who
keeps a glass of beer in his hand and is very red in his face, is
secretly appeasing her. All right, you are quite right. Then, what
you want for me to do – eh? . . . He then claps his hands (this is

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 the Japanese habit of call maid-servant) and the couple hurries
for Shimbashi Station. What are they? The drunkard and the
belle! The big old rat has been caught by a small mild cat!

The Ginza with its chains of light, its kilometres of neon, its strolling
throngs, its pleasure-bent crowds, was destroyed on one warm
March night in 1945 when American B-29’s dropped their tons of
fire-bombs on the city. Ginza slowly emerged from the confla-
gration, but it never recovered. Though the famous street stalls re-
appeared (now selling the detritus of war rather than the latest
foreign fashions), the Hattori Building became the 8th Army PX,
and the Matsuya Department Store became the Allied Commissary.
Up the street, the Imperial Hotel was taken over by American staff
officers, and down the street the bombed-out ruins of the Kabuki-za
remained.
That which was not destroyed by war was now set upon by
peace. Money slowly left the Ginza and travelled further west. Such
movement is, of course, a part of the history of the city. To travel as
we have done from the Low City into the High is to move in time as
well as space. Asakusa, Ueno, Ginza, Shinjuku are temporal strata.
They were, in turn, the financial centres of Tokyo, the place to which
the crowds came, in which the most money was spent.
The Ginza is now a shopping street like any other, and it closes,
like any other, when it gets dark. No more kilometres of neon. The
lavish bars and cabarets of the post-war era are now all shut –
bankrupt or otherwise out of business. No-one does the ginbura
anymore, and the moga, mobo, suito garu and boi garu have all meta-
morphosed. They are now to be found in Roppongi, that crossing
once near the barracks and now near the discotheques, or in that
shopping paradise for the young, Harajuku, or in the last and largest
of Tokyo’s night cities – Shinjuku.

Regarding the Japanese propensity for pleasure, Lafcadio Hearn

wrote in an 1895 letter to Basil Hall Chamberlin: ‘Here, remember the
people really eat lotuses; they form a common article of the diet.’
He was referring to the national talent for enjoyment and

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indulgence – after the rigours of duty, the pleasures of frivolity. The
Edo official tired after hours of duty went to relax in the pleasure-
town to the north. The Tokyo office worker exhausted after hours of
work goes to lose himself in the night city to the west: Shinjuku.
Some sixteen minutes by subway from the Ginza (and more
than an hour by foot, did anyone ever attempt it), Shinjuku is a
common business district by day and an extraordinary pleasure
warren by night. The west side now contains the Tokyo Town Hall
and other assorted skyscrapers, and Shinjuku Station is said to be
the busiest in the world, but the place is much more famous for its
east side. Here are located the various night-towns that make up
this extraordinary nocturnal city.
Unlike Asakusa, which grew naturally around a popular temple,
Shinjuku was, like Tokyo itself, created by decree. In 1698, it was
felt that a new post station should be built along the Koshu Kaido,
the road that entered from the west, since both horses and riders
needed to rest. Shinjuku (the name means ‘New Lodgings’) was the
result. Another was that, like most post stations, it became a brothel
district. It was consequently closed and then, in 1772, opened again
on provision that appropriate taxes would be paid on whatever
businesses thrived there.
In just a few decades, there were over 50 inns inhabited by pros-
titutes known as ‘serving girls’. These had nothing like the fame of
the Yoshiwara girls and were called, Paul Waley tells us, ‘flowers in
the horse dung’. In the Great Kanto Earthquake, Yoshiwara burnt
down and Shinjuku didn’t. It prospered.
Something of what it must have been like can still be seen in
the section known as the Golden Gai (also known as Shomben
Nakacho, which might be inadequately rendered as ‘inside pissing
quarters’), a small, crammed warren of questionable bars and
disreputable-looking drinking stalls with rooms upstairs. Though
developers have been at work for years, the owners are hardy and
have not as yet agreed to being evicted. Walking these narrow lanes
with the smell of sake and toasted squid in the air, amid the calls of
the women and the lighted lanterns of their shops, it is possible to
imagine the Shinjuku of long ago.

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 Elsewhere, too, the ancient air of licensed pleasure perseveres. In
East Shinjuku are whole buildings devoted to indulgence. Like
stacked plates, these edifices contain restaurants and bars on every
floor, a vertical version of the horizontal warren. Each is slightly
different from the other, for Tokyo nightlife tries to seem as indi-
vidual as Tokyo architecture, and whole sections are given over to
specialities.
The area around Shinjuku Two-Chome, for example, was origi-
nally one of the two red-light districts (the other was around
Hanazono Shrine, merging into the Golden Gai) where ‘girls’ stood
in front of lighted doorways and beckoned. After 1958 and the new
law, they offered cameras or sketch pads and pencils, announcing
that they were models. Business did not thrive. For one thing, the
metropolitan police cracked down in anticipation of the 1964
Olympics. For another, the homosexual community –- not the kind
of customers the resident girls had in mind – decided to flock there,
and there it still roosts.
Like everywhere else, Japan practises double standards – this is
as true of sexual mores as it is of trade procedures. There is the rigid
official standard, that of the government, of politicians and of the
press. Then there is the personal standard of the average person,
which is relaxed indeed.
The visiting foreigner, once he has come to understand this,
perceives Japan as one of the most sexually permissive places on
earth. But if he runs up against the law or the press, he will suddenly
find himself in the Victorian age. Everything is forbidden. Urinating
on the street, a common offense, is covered by the public-decency
laws. Couples petting in public parks are liable under the anti-
obscenity laws. These laws are rarely enforced, but the wise visitor
should steer clear of official Japan while doing what he wants.
This is what the wise Japanese does. He pays lip-service to the
laws, is a strong believer in public morality, then goes out for an
evening in Shinjuku and does anything he feels like doing. It is not a
question of hypocrisy; it is a question of expediency. He will cluck
his tongue disapprovingly at the rise in vice and will then go and
willingly surrender himself to the ministrations of a local employee.

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 Kabuki-cho, a section of Shinjuku to the west, is the usual desti-
nation. Its name has nothing to do with the national drama (at one
point, politicians decided to rebuild the Kabuki-za there; they
didn’t, but the name stuck) other than that it concerns itself with the
permissive indulgence that the old Edo kept alive on its stage.
Shinjuku, more than offering opportunity, specializes in offering
the air of opportunity. Shinjuku at night seems an enormous palace
of a thousand delights, all of them presumably available. Walking
the brilliant alleys, smiled at by countless young women as they
stand in their doorways or on corners (‘Just come in and have a
beer’), surrounded by thousands of other pleasure-seekers, one
feels that right here, just around the corner, is the experience, the
person, the face, that one has always needed to make one whole.
Love, one knows, is near.
It isn’t – at least, not any nearer than it ever is. But Shinjuku
maintains the feeling that it is, a wonderfully wrought emotional
illusion. One can wander happily all night long. Comes the dawn
and one is philosophical. Oh, it’s there all right; one just didn’t
happen to find it, a wrong turning somewhere. There is always
tomorrow night.
Like all really good night-towns, Shinjuku offers a continued
and unredeemed promise. One of the reasons is its prodigal dis-
play; another is the good will of those out to make money. This
makes Shinjuku seems so electric, so vital, so alive that it does not
seem to be a part of Japan.
Yet it is. It is just that it is different from the official version.
Indeed, it is, in its way, a microcosm of Tokyo itself. Big, sprawling,
forever metamorphosing, packaging all the advantages of over-
crowding with all the charms of free enterprise. Noisy, forever
under construction, Shinjuku is not (despite its share of rip-off
joints) hostile or (money-grubbing though it is) cynical. It is mas-
sive, crammed, bewildering, but it is also warm and filled with
the wonderful innocence of just being alive. If old Edo – Tokyo’s
legacy – is to be found anywhere, it is in Kabuki-cho at 11:00 on a
Friday night.

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Tokyo, this changing city – the more one gazes, the more one real-
izes how singular it is. Lafcadio Hearn recognized this one January
day in 1895 when he wrote a letter to Sentaro Nishida in which he
noted: ‘There is no Japan like Tokyo.’
Indeed, and now in a double sense, since Tokyo has spread itself
across the land. Tokyo language has smothered the dialects, Tokyo
cuisine has driven out provincial specialities, Tokyo fashion has
pushed aside regional dress. If there is no Japan like Tokyo, it is
because everything is the capital and in this sense there are no more
provinces.
A city, a country, in flux. We are surprised because ours are
apparently not, at least not in so large, noticeable, definite a manner.
Looking at Tokyo, one is reminded of the Buddist condition shogyo
mujo. All is transient, impermanent; nothing is fixed, all is in motion
– life is illusory. Tokyo is in this sense a Buddhist capital, a mandala
illustrating mujo, impermanence itself.
A people, the Japanese, inured to this are in a way like the early
Christians. Both expected human suffering and were used to it. All
of life’s injustices were accepted precisely because in these religions
– being Buddhist, being Christian, being Japanese – this life was a
vale of tears. It still is.
People who believe this are tractable. They are trained to put up
with a good deal, encouraged to believe that this is their lot. The
control of the Church in the West, the control of the State (the
Shogunate) in Japan, was the result.
This faith in the future renders the present fleeting, transient,
impermanent. Human beings and all their works are subject to
time and its work. Even space itself is mutable. It is not to be defined
as something contained within walls. It is fluid and in constant
transformation.
Space is not, consequently, empty. Though the West has long
defined it as such, as something to be filled, both China and Japan
still think it something other. Both believe that the essense of all
things is this undefined quality, which the Chinese call chi and the
Japanese, ki.
Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, explained this nothingness

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with the example of a vase. Though it was made of clay, the essence
was in the emptiness within. Thus the enclosed, the defined, was ‘full’
of essence. He said nothing of the emptiness outside, however. It is
only the controlled, used, appreciated, enclosed space that is not
empty. It becomes something that is to be separated from the empti-
ness outside. There is a difference between these two kinds of space.
The Japanese do not need to fill a container (a vase, a picture, a
room, a narrative, a floral arrangement, a tea ceremony) – it may be
left as it is (what we call empty) because it is enclosed (by its structure,
its architecture, its perimeter, its purpose) and is hence already full.
One still sees extensions everywhere: the dichotomy between
outside and inside; the private garden, the public street; the name-
less others outside, the named insiders – the nakama, just us, our
gang. But for how long, I wonder.
Yoshinobu Ashihara, a contemporary architect, thinks not for
long. As industrialization advances, he says, the attachments that
grow out of a sense of community fade. Residential areas fill up
with huge company apartment complexes where corporate hier-
archy reaches out even to the home life of employees, ‘where people
must dwell in concrete boxes, situated in a townscape they can have
no voice or role in creating’.
The sense of community becomes artificial, attached to corpora-
tion or government. The ties of married life, of family, the natural
nakama, are loosening. Younger people choose the anonymity and
impersonality of the big city. They choose the blind gaze of organi-
zation rather than the stares of community.

Henry James, speaking of the modern city, said that it was ‘crowned
not only with no history but no possiblity of time for history, and
consecrated by no uses save the commercial at any cost’. He had the
‘skyscrapers’ of New York (c. 1910) in mind, but he might have been
speaking of Tokyo nearing the year 2000.
Tokyo grows; the expected population U-turn has never occurred.
As I write, the newspaper informs me that the city’s permanent
population has hit 11,824,617. (I am among the 16,822 Americans
living here . . . there are only 6,654 British.)

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 And since the city was designed (in that it was designed at all) for a
small space, this means a geometrical increase in specialized demand.
Water, gas, sewage, garbage – all are much more complicated now
and demand a more complicated system of administration.
Tokyo grows not only sidewards, across the river, over the plains,
but up and down as well. Demand overrides tradition. Japan as
prone to earthquakes has been forgotten because it would cost too
much money to remember.
Already there are gaps in the infrastructure. The homeless are
not housed because the family always looked after its own but
now it doesn’t. The young are not trained because mother and
father both work and expect the school to do it, but the school has
no provisions for doing so.
Standards are declining; this shows in small ways. Even a decade
ago, people did not eat on the street; now, in the days of ‘finger-lick-
in’ good’, everyone does. Even five years ago, a person standing on a
street corner, sitting on the subway or in a concert hall, shouting,
mobile phone in hand, would have attracted censure. Not now. There
is now no resistance to the shinhatsubai. Convenience is ultimately
stronger than tradition.
I have often wondered where the old shinhatsubai go. They dis-
appear, all these expensive new products. I suppose they become
garbage. This is now a matter of some civic concern, though not
enough for anyone to do anything about it.
As Tokyo spreads further and further across the Kanto plain,
it must cast its waste wider. The city manages to toss out some
20,000 tons a day of what it no longer wants – this includes not only
sewage and other organic garbage but bicycles and refrigerators,
air conditioners and automobiles.
Again I am reminded of one of Calvino’s cities – this time,
Leonia. Here is a city that refashions itself every day, and ‘. . . you
can measure its opulence not by what is manufactured but what is
thrown out to make room for the new. A fortress of indestructible
leftovers surrounds Leonia, dominating it on every side, like a
chain of mountains.’ In Tokyo, the amount of garbage doubles every
ten years. The landfills are almost full.

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We are now in the rapidly filling suburbs to the west. Looking back,
we can see the towers of Shinjuku reddening in the reflected setting
sun. Beyond lies the distant Tokyo through which we have travelled.
Invisible, somewhere there in the east, is the modest citadel – the
pine groves, the empty centre.
Over the years, I have looked out upon this metamorphosing
city. The roofs change. Grey-tiled, slanted, curved – this meant some-
thing traditional underneath: wood, sliding doors, tatami mats.
Now it also means expense: wood is dear, sliding doors don’t hold
the heat. So the roofs change. The houses are concrete blocks, apart-
ments, no roofs at all. Ferro-concrete is cheap and holds the heat.
Electricity bills go down in such boxes.
The view has changed. The grey-tiled roofs made a natural
pattern like bark on a tree. Now there are fewer trees as well. They
are too expensive. Nature is a luxury when it occupies land so
precious that a plot the size of my desk costs more than I will ever
have in the bank. A garden or a grove is no longer to be afforded –
which is why such ground now becomes an apartment, or a conve-
nience store, or a parking lot. Somewhere for people to gather.
People – how many of them, how many more than there were.
The landscape is crammed with them. No kimono, of course.
People stopped buying them years ago. This lack of sales meant
higher unit prices. So few are now sold, so few are now made, that
the price is almost beyond the means of all. The ones you see are
often rented – for weddings, funerals, those rituals where tradition
meaninglessly maintains itself.
My view has become a crammed mosaic, a die-cut vista, a thou-
sand people to one tree. Need one be a romantic to regret this? I
think not. One is allowed nostalgia in face of the inevitable, when
one remembers a time when people could afford to live less crowded
lives, could see a tree as a part of themselves. Something is taking its
place, to be sure, but at the same time something is crowding it out.
Yet something also remains.

August 4, 1978. In the evening I go to the summer festival, the

annual ueki-ichi at Shinobazu in Ueno. The wide, shallow pond,

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dark with leaves, filled with large pink lotuses, each tightly
closed into a big bud. Night, the shore outlined with red and blue
lanterns proclaiming the name of their donor – Kirin Beer.
Under them the stalls: all kinds of bonsai – one perfect mina-
ture red maple selling for £600; rocks, big and little; fish stalls
with many kinds of goldfish swimming, specially bred, enor-
mous heads like bull-dogs, or long fins like the tails of the sacred
roosters; the insect stalls with little cages holding a bell-bug,
or a katydid, larger cages with struggling stag-beetles in them;
shaved-ice sellers, glazed squid stands, makers of spun sugar,
crystallized cakes of brown sugar, or fruit in ice on sticks; the
minnow game with hooks that bend and paper nets that
dissolve; fried soba; glass animals; quilted beasts; fireworks
sellers.
Japan in the summer is always more Japanese and never more
so than at this fair. Families in summer yukata, clacking along on
geta, gang boys hawking in cummerbunds and shorts; old gentle-
men shuffling about in suteteko and underwear tops, carrying
fans; girls back from the bath with wet hair sleeked back, towels
in hands. This is what Japan once looked like. Summer brings it
back again. And old attitudes as well. A sudden interest in
nature, here in the bowels of the city. Exclamations at the size of
the lotus buds. And a much slower tempo. No one striding,
everyone strolling. And with it the old politeness. People stand-
ing to one side for each other. Nor are they self-conscious in their
‘native’ dress. This is because these few summer weeks are
still the proper time for it. They get out the yukata every year.
Usually there is dancing as well but last night was too early. The
tower is ready, and the drums are there, but the dancing circle is
empty. People wander around it but no-one even attempts to
dance. It is not yet the time nor the place.
I go look at the single phallic stone left, on its little wooded
island next to the temple of Benten. Then I eat fried soba at a little
restaurant put together of straw and wood and rope on the edge
of the lake and watch the budded lotus, pink and heavy. They
will open at dawn.

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And I remember Kafu. In the early part of the century, he was
regretting the passing of the latter part of the century before. And
in the middle of this century, he was complaining, remembering
the early part of the century. Fifty years from now, this time about
which I am complaining will probably have become someone else’s
golden age.

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